


Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints

by Black_Eyed_Suzannah_Q



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars - The Force Awakens, Star Wars - The Last Jedi - Fandom, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: All the Guns, Alternate Universe - Western, Angst, BB-8's a Mustang, Cattle Branding, Competence Porn, Don't Try This At Home, Eventual Smut, Explosives, F/M, Homesteader!Rey, Homesteading, Jail-Breaking, Kylo Ren Pain Train, Masturbation, Outlaw Gang!Knights of Ren, Outlaw!Kylo, Railroads, Ranching, Sensual Hair-Brushing, Sensual Shaving, Slow Burn, Spaghetti Western, The Millennium Falcon's a Mule, This Fic is Rough on Everyone, Westworld-Inspired, Wild West, scenery, so many injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-05-29 17:22:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 118,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15078044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Eyed_Suzannah_Q/pseuds/Black_Eyed_Suzannah_Q
Summary: Rey’s a fiercely independent homesteader. Kylo Ren’s an outlaw seeking revenge, and maybe redemption.A stray gunshot brings them together…...while everything else tries to tear them apart.Taglines:Save a horse, ride a Solo!- credit to SaturnineFelineMillie kneels for no man.- credit to Ria84





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As long promised, away we gallop with a spaghetti western! Updates on Sundays. :)
> 
> Here's some [fun Western film music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4MOLgIobs0) to get ya in the mood.

A long, drawn-out howl shivers through the night, waking hair along Rey’s arms and flicking open her half-masted eyes.

_Wolves._

It’s calving season, and she hasn’t bothered to undress—just collapsed into her willow-backed rocking chair after a dinner of tinned beans straight from the can, still in her trousers—so now she shrugs into a man’s jacket, pulls on her work boots, and grabs her 12-gauge shotgun before heading for the door. She’s half-asleep, but her hands are steady on the gun’s stock and the flickering lantern she’s lifted from the porch. Her feet carry her without stumbling away from her chilly, stove-lit shanty and to the barn.

Tacking up her painted mustang takes barely a minute, and then Rey’s in the saddle, urging Little Bee from his stall with knees and heels, riding down toward the cattle pastures she’s staked out between isolated, wind-shaped plateaus making menacing shapes against a dark sky.

The howling comes again. _Louder. Closer._

But she’s not afraid, and neither is Little Bee.

This isn’t their first calving season.

Holding the mustang to a hand-gallop with the reins in her teeth, lantern hooked over her saddlehorn, Rey swings up her shotgun, sighting along the barrel for a gleam of yellow eyes as she nears the split-rail fencing erected for her calving cows. It’s safer to keep them confined together in the valley for birthing—this way, she doesn’t have to leave her homestead unprotected while hunting down a wayward calf in a gully or ravine—but herding the cattle together also means that they’re easy targets for wolves, coyotes, or rustlers.

The herd stirs uneasily as Rey circles the enclosure, her shotgun’s metallic odor unnerving the cows even while her familiar presence soothes them. There’s a scent of blood in the air, hanging over the arena. It hints at new life fallen from a womb, but also at the possibility of death from slavering jaws in the darkness. She sings as she circles Little Bee around her stock. Sticking close to the fencing, Rey casts her voice over lowing heads shaking stubby, stumpy horns, bovine eyes making white gleams as they catch the bobbing lantern-light. She’s scanning for a tangle of afterbirth-smeared legs, listening for a bleating, plaintive cry from a calf hungry to nurse—and looking for shadows emerging down from the hills around her ranch, listening for the padding of soft, predatory feet.

Rey never sleeps much during calving season.

So she sings to keep herself awake as she rides again and again around the enclosure, Little Bee’s hooves beating out a steady tempo beneath her as they slow from a gallop to a rolling, three-beat canter. Too comfortable. She can sleep in the saddle— _easy._ She sings to calm her cattle when the wolves send up a fresh cry; a stampede in the small arena will crush any new calves beneath frantic hooves. And she sings to let the wolves know that she’s here.

That she’s ready for them.

She’s an excellent shot. Even on horseback, even in the dark, Rey rarely misses her target. The wolves in the hills around the town of Sweet Springs know this. They’ve left her and hers alone for most of the calving season. They’ve bothered other homesteaders further afield, or harassed supply wagons feeding work gangs on a railroad line entering the valley’s eastern quadrant and aiming to pass near the town. But they’re coming tonight, and that means they’re hungry or desperate.

Or both.

Which is odd. Because the rainfall’s been good this year in the lowlands and the mountains surrounding them. Deer are plentiful in the valley. There’s enough to eat off the land for everyone; Rey’s smokehouse is stacked high with cured venison steaks for leaner times in winter, and her traplines are flush with coveys. Her little garden plot’s a riot of green bell peppers. Wells are full, and streams run high against their banks. Beavers have begun to dam some of the waterways, which stabilizes the ground, which encourages new grass, which builds forests, which Rey can harvest for timber to shore up her shanty next winter. Make it a real home.

There’s been hope with every sunrise. She’s even entertained the idea—as she’s drifting off to sleep and her half-conscious mind allows her to consider the impossible—that she might _finally_ be starting to make a proper life for herself after all this time, beholden to no one...that perhaps the bad times aren’t coming again.

But something’s driving the wolf packs down out of the hills and toward ranches around the town.

Wolves are brazen when they’re pressed, but they’re generally gentle, skittish animals. They’ll avoid conflict with the homesteaders if they can. So their approach tonight is surprising. Not that she isn’t ready for them—Rey’s always ready for creatures or men coming to take what’s hers. This readiness is what’s kept her alive on her ranch, with her cattle, defending her deeded right to this land as a single, independent woman.

A woman alone—doing a man’s work, and more.

Except for the happenings in Sweet Springs, it’s been a banner season.

So it’s unusual for wolves to be coming to tangle with her now.

She’ll have to ride out tomorrow for the hills...see what’s causing this attack...change it, or stop it…something...

Rey’s chin thunks against her clavicles. _Bump, bump, bump._  Sweet lord, she’s tired. She’s been sleeping in her rocking chair rather than her bed for the past weeks, always half-awake, half-ready to gallop down to the pastures. She can’t _not_ be ready. For rustlers, wolves, fire—anything. _Always._ That’s the price of her liberty, her independence from anyone who might stake a claim on her. It’s fine. Really. But all she wants to do is collapse forward against Little Bee’s mane and rest her head for a while. She’s been circling the herd’s enclosure for what seems like hours, and the wolves still haven’t broken their shadowy ranks to strike.

 _Get on with it,_ she thinks, eyes scrunching closed while she yawns—

They do.

As though they’ve been waiting for her moment of distraction and weakness, the pack springs into action the instant that she falls into her yawn’s clutches. Shadows slither across the pasturelands, grey and tan hides stretched over muscle and cunning, lit with fierce golden eyes, tongues lolling over black-speckled lips.

Without conscious thought, Rey’s shotgun swings up into her hands from its resting holster on her saddle. Her finger tightens on the trigger. A slug explodes from the barrel.

A yelp, and a body slumps down bare yards from the cattle’s fencing.

She pumps the shotgun’s action. Rey fires again. Little Bee’s ears hardly flick at the sound. His hooves maintain their steady, sturdy beating while another body falls, keening.

A moment of animal terror at the deathly noise, this second killing—and then the remainder of the wolf pack flees, chittering and barking. Driven back from her, and from their dead. Rey tracks their retreat, lips pinched between her teeth in concentration, sighting along the shotgun’s barrel as the predators tear away for safety in the surrounding mountains. Up, up, leaping along clay-red bluffs and slopes striped with fossils and shale—her barrel swings higher, and she presses the trigger like a caress.

A howl, dying away. Pebbles scatter as a body slides backward down the hillside, momentum emptied from it like water seeping away between cupped hands. She fires a fourth time.

It’s so easy. Death comes naturally to her. She’s seen so much, been dealt so much. She’s learned from masters. She can give as good as she gets.

And she’s very good.

Rey expects this of herself. She has to.

What she’s not expecting is a literal shot in the dark—and not from her shotgun. A vast, echoing thunderclap of a sound hurtling down from the hills, crashing over her herd.

A reply.

—

His mouth is gritty and sour from breathing through a black bandana wrapped over his jaw. Keeping out the dust. Forcing him to marinate in his own sweat. Dust has blown in through his shirt’s open neck, and his skin is tacky with layers of moisture and dirt. His hair straggles from beneath his black-brimmed hat, plastered against his nape and temples. It’s been days since he’s bathed.

Days since any of them bathed. They’ve been riding for a week now, up from barren plains on the far side of Sweet Springs’ mountains, through passes and ravines where any standing pools are brackish, then down from the hill country and to tablelands where grazing is good and water is plentiful. Untainted by metal runoff, screaming smoke, and putrid bison carcasses. They’ve been driven from their camp by brutal dust storms whipping up from an eroding land, mountains blasted by dynamite, dirt rising against the sky in sullen brown clouds. Fleeing the stench and disease of flesh left to rot under a scorching sun. Straight into the unmerciful jaws of the same folk who drove Ren away last time.

Last time.

_Rustler._

_Thief._

_Bandit._

_Dead man walking._

He’s been called all of these things, and worse. Not that he hasn’t deserved the epithets. He’s claimed them and forged them into himself. Not pain from these hurled words, but strength.

_Killer._

But he’s been left with no other choice. None of them have a choice. So they’ve come back west because they can’t go east—not the likes of them, not now, not with the land dying as iron tracks advance across it. Coming back to fertile valleys and rivers. Back to Sweet Springs.

The Ren Seven, they were called before, with their wanted posters stuck up on every window and boarded wall in that shitty little town. And now the Ren Seven ride again with six new faces, Kylo Ren still at their head.

_Kylo Ren: wanted dead or alive._

_Seriously, make up your goddamn minds,_ he’d thought when he’d seen the posters. Riding through the single wagon-width street running along the town’s length, he’d torn off the sketches of himself and his old mates—dead now, all of them—from swinging saloon doors and notice boards, from the post office and hitching posts. Plastered everywhere that glue would stick against wind-scoured wood and finger-greased window glass, his own face had glowered back at him on the night after he’d ridden up to the town’s sorry excuse for a bank with his rifle blazing. He’d needed the money to get out. Enough to get back east through trampled grasslands and to the cities, where he’d be unknown. Start a new life.

A life where he could be free of that name. That awful name. _Finally._

He’d barely escaped. The others hadn’t been so lucky.

But ten years later, he still hasn’t made it back east. There’s no way to cross the plains on foot or on horseback now. No game left to hunt, no clean water. So Ren’s men gallop west when he tells them to. None of them would think to disobey. Not with all that Kylo Ren has done. He’d avoid Sweet Springs if he could, of course, but the next town west beyond it is a week’s ride away. It’s not an option _not_ to replenish their dwindling supplies in Sweet Springs.

So they’ll take the risk, because they have to. Take the risk—and other things, as well.

“Ride through after dark?” his lieutenant, Joshua, asks him, nudging his horse alongside Ren’s and jerking his chin down the scrub-lined, rocky ridge where they’ve drawn up. Faint pulses of light mark out the valley’s town against the surrounding landscape as it turns to a gray and lavender dusk, brilliant color fading from awesome stone pinnacles standing as silent, ancient sentinels to Sweet Springs’ inhabitants. “We’ll be in and out with the job before they know we’re there.”

Joshua is a cautious man, but ruthless in a shootout or a brawl. Clever, not just brawn and a temper. In another gang, he’d be the undisputed head. But Joshua’s seen Ren’s wanted posters like all the rest—Ren’s made sure of it—so he’s never questioned the crew’s leadership. And really, there’s no point in risking a firefight. Ren knows this.

But he hates the caution.

“Yes, good.”

The rest of his gang dismounts, groaning at stiffness in their legs and asses as they feed and water their horses. They’re all hard riders, but this endless retreat has worn them down. They’re angry and weary and hungry. They’re supposed to be heading east for easy pickings in the cities, but instead...driven back west like the outlaws they are, eking out a precarious existence in the hills. Arnold stretches with a hand in the small of his back, groaning, and takes a swing from the bitter whiskey that Gregory’s passing around. John cradles his harmonica but doesn’t raise it to his mouth—even several miles away, they’re too close to the town; sound funnels through the valley with unnerving precision.

“Shit, I’m tired.” Frank tips a sweat-plastered hat over his eyes and leans back against a tree bent and stunted with wind.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Ren warns. “We ride out in an hour. As soon as it gets dark.”

_In and out._

He won’t have to see her.

_A reward for any man who brings in the gang’s leader, Madame Mayor? Dead or alive…_

Those sketches and posters. She must’ve agreed.

Damn her.

It’s not that he cares.

_Dead or alive._

Those crimes beneath his name...she’d believed everyone else but him.

And the reward—insultingly low. Twenty-five dollars for his body. _Dead or alive._

He doesn’t care.

Not caring takes the better part of the hour they spend on the ridge, keeping their silhouettes low while there’s still pigment in the sky, waiting for the town to darken its oil street lamps and its saloons. Waiting for their business to begin.

Some part of him wonders whether she’d kill him if she got the chance. And what he’d do, if she tried. But he won’t see her, and she won’t see him. He’ll get what he wants from Sweet Springs, and then he’ll be gone with what revenge he can take. But she’ll have gotten her way, just as she always does. No one says _no_ to Leia Organa. Not twice, at any rate.

_Sending him away._

But she’ll know he’s been there; he’ll make sure of it. And she’ll know that because she wouldn’t listen to him, he’s become exactly the man she feared he would be. Her fault.

So goddamn her.

“Get up,” he snarls to Frank when the last threads of sunlight fade from the tablelands and darkness leaches into the valley’s heart.

Silently, they tighten their horses’ girths and mount up, adjusting to their saddles’ grooves again with swallowed groans at stiffened muscles forced back into action. Then they begin their slow, wary descent. It’s a treacherous path of switchbacks that winds down from the ridge to the valley floor, with shale pebbles sliding under the horses’ hooves and a nearly sheer drop from the mountain’s crest to the flatlands—but it’s the only way back to Sweet Springs where they can move unseen. Only Ren and his gang are foolhardy or confident enough to attempt to traverse this trail in the dark; no one will suspect that they’re coming. There’s safety in stupidity, sometimes. As Ren has to remind himself every time he looks at Frank.

But stupidity is biddable, and he needs these men.

Except for perhaps Joshua, they’re too stupid to see the truth.

He’s focused on steadying himself by gripping his horse’s mane with one hand and holding his rifle ready in the other, eyes on the switchback path to guide his mount along its tortuous, shelf-wide width, an eerie ringing in his ears that isn’t nerves— _it isn’t_ —when a shot explodes in the valley below.

Ren’s tinnitus cuts off abruptly with the gunshot. And he understands almost as immediately— _singing._ Relief nearly makes him smile behind his damp bandana. It wasn’t nerves at all; it was _singing._ Singing down in the valley.

And definitely not an ambush.

“Hold your positions,” he calls in a low voice, the full weight of his command behind the syllables. “They’re not shooting at us.” Ren raises his rifle to enforce the order, halting his men. Forcing them to a listening stillness.

A howl drifts up against the sky, ghostly and fading.

“Wolves. They’re shooting at wolves. They won’t notice us.” He clicks his tongue to his horse, whose hide shivers. “Walk on—”

The blast of a second round ricochets off the valley’s slopes.

Following it: another primal, canine scream. Whoever’s firing is a very good shot, picking off the wolves in near-total darkness. A tiny circle of light—a lantern?—bobs on the flatlands below, its jolting, rolling motion suggesting that the marksman’s on horseback. _Damn._ Ren’s impressed in spite of himself, craning his neck away from his mount’s path to watch the precise slaughter. Aiming on a galloping horse isn’t easy—a truth he’s made use of many times when evading lawmen.

But Sweet Springs’ sheriff uses a Colt pistol. And is a useless prettyboy, in Ren’s mind. So who the hell is _this_?

A third shot recoils against the hillside, barely ten yards from Ren’s horse. Distracted by the glimmering lantern, by a memory of curled brown hair and a cocky grin, he barely has a half-second of warning. Blood’s hot scent, the fetid odor of lolling tongues, an overpowering musk of wolves, a fourth explosion from the marksman’s shotgun—his mount shrieks. Panicked, it rears against the onslaught of predators swarming across the mountainside path in desperate flight from the valley’s shooter. Its hooves paw at the star-strewn sky while wolves flee beneath the horse’s arched belly and through its quivering legs, withers rising too high, too fast, Ren grabbing for his saddlehorn in an instinctive, last-ditch effort to hold on as the world upends—but the animal overbalances from his weight clinging against the horn and they both begin to fall, skidding on the pebbled path, tilting out over the steep, stony slope—

Crumbling and sliding, the edge of the trail gives way under them with a stomach-churning, inevitable slowness, so slowly that Ren can’t even yell. His voice is frozen. They drop, the horse crushing him beneath its shoulder. More than feeling, he _hears_ his leg break. Not a high snap, but a low, grinding crush of sound, two boulders rubbing against each other, shearing off shards. The horse struggles to rise as the hillside sucks at them with a shower of stones and a building avalanche of blood-red dirt, its full weight pressed against Ren’s broken bone, using him for leverage. But then—one foreleg snaps. And the other, as the horse lunges for balance.

An equine scream, agony and panic.

Everything is happening too fast now, thrusting him into a whirling kaleidoscope of fractured images, each sharper than a knife—dust billowing into his lungs, the horse’s forelegs flailing, hooves striking his ribs, his shoulders, his heel hooked through the stirrup so he can’t yank his broken leg free—his mount thrashing—his finger on his rifle’s trigger, which depresses against his already-broken thigh and sends a searing slug straight through him, almost cauterizing the skin—

“ _Ren!_ ” One of the others, but it’s too late—

The ground softens and dissolves. Gravity takes him.

—

A distracting ringing tingles Rey’s ears from her shotgun’s echoing rapport, from that sudden reply somewhere on the shadow-painted hillside, but her eyes are clear and sharp in the darkness as she tracks her next target. Her barrel rises along a falling swath of reddish dust skidding down the slope...and she frowns, the muzzle dropping a scant half-inch. These wolves coming for her cattle are buffalo wolves—she recognizes the distinct hunches to their shoulders, their dark, mottled coloring, and their imposing build—but this blooming dust cloud is much larger than the thin trickle rising from the body of the last wolf she’s shot.

She hesitates for the full length of a pounding heartbeat. Deciding. No time to second-guess her instincts. Rey spurs Little Bee away from the calving enclosure, galloping toward the nearest mountain slope overshadowing her homestead. She braces the shotgun against her shoulder. If it’s a cattle rustler or a damn _bear—_

There’s a huddled shape where the hillside levels out into Rey’s pastureland. _Breathing._ Shuddering, horrifying gasps interspersed with little wickering breaths of panic. A horse. Head arched back in defeat, jugular exposed. It’s blacker than the midnight sky overhead, but blood liberally streaks its raven hide and patches of skin are peeled away. Both forelegs are shattered.

 _Oh no._ No, no, this poor, beautiful creature…

The horse is still saddled, its girth slipping loose. Reins are caught around its broken knees. Heedless of these warning signs, Rey dismounts from Little Bee in a rush and drops to her heels beside the animal. She strokes a palm along the horse’s bristly cheek. It groans at her touch. Foam froths from its muzzle, painting its sweat-matted chest with white lines. Blood pools in its nostrils. It gives a terrible cough and the white froth bubbles pink, dribbling into the lush pasture grasses. Something—probably a rib—has punctured its lungs.

_No…_

But this creature is in agony. And there’s no way to splint two fractured forelegs. Not for a horse.

“I’m sorry. So sorry. This shouldn’t have happened to you.” Rey continues stroking the horse’s cheek to soothe it. Promising _—you’re not alone._ “Someone should’ve protected you.” Blindering the animal with a hand cupped over its eye so it doesn’t see the shotgun, she lines up her barrel with the horse’s ears, directly over the weakest point in its skull.

“Be at peace,” she says, the only blessing she believes in.

Rey eases her trigger back.

The horse stills.

Little Bee whuffles his distress, nuzzling at his fallen kin. Rey reaches up for his mane and hauls herself to her feet, her shotgun’s barrel smoking faintly. She strokes a hand over the muscled curve of Little Bee’s neck, tracing the hardy beating of his pulse, the strength of life flowing through him, though herself. “I wouldn’t have been able to save him. I’m sorry. He was too broken.”

She fixes broken things. It’s who she is. Not tonight, though. She hates that she’s failed.

But then—a moan.

An animal sound. Not from the horse.

Little Bee’s ears flick. He shoulders against Rey, who swings up her shotgun.

_Wolf? Bear? Panther?_

Again, that moan. Rey listens for its echoes. Yes, an animal sound...but not made by an animal.

_A man._

“Who’s there?” she asks.

It’s something of a rhetorical question; no one making that noise will still be conscious. The shooter? Squinting and hitching at her belt, Rey steps around the horse’s body and digs her toes into the bracken- and pebble-strewn slope rising above her. With a push from her calves, she starts to climb. First upright, then on hands and knees when the incline becomes too dangerous to navigate on her feet. Silty loam beneath the shifting pebble patchwork carves a home beneath her nails from where her left hand clenches into the soil to grant her a tenuous anchor on the hillside. Her right hand grips her shotgun.

The man’s unconscious, but she’s not a fool.

There’s a shape that might be an abstract approximation of a splayed human body about five yards up the slope from her position when Rey crawls to a stop. If she had her lantern...but it’s hooked from Little Bee’s saddlehorn down on the flatlands. No use to her here.

“Are you hurt?” she tries again, eyes narrowed through the dust and dark. This inquiry’s just as rhetorical as her first one; no healthy person makes sounds like the ones issuing from this body.

Broken, pitiful noises.

Could she have accidentally shot this man instead of the last wolf she’d aimed for? And he’d fired back in a counterattack?

Moisture glints in the soil, seeping down from the man’s leg and spreading a patch of incriminating wetness.

Manslaughter, if he dies.

Or worse charges.

There are plenty of men in Sweet Springs hankering after Rey’s 160 acres of fertile pastureland and her herd—unprotected if she’s locked away in jail. Men who say she’s no right to her land, that she wasn’t the one who paid cold coin for it. Yet her surname matches the one on the government’s contract; that counts for something, even out here. But she has to stay on her land for five years after the contract’s signing date, six months of every year. Only then can she claim the Homestead Act’s protection. If she’s hauled away to jail...

Rey makes a very quick calculation. And the tally is this: if she’s going to keep what’s hers, this man can’t die.

Shotgun at the ready, she inches closer to the whimpering shape, her boots sending rocks skittering down the hillside in a potent reminder of how her own body will plummet if she loses her balance. Yes—definitely a man, limbs sprawled as he’s fallen, one foot bare from where his boot’s been dragged off. Probably caught in a stirrup. Given the odd, fractured angle between his knee and ankle, his leg’s broken.

But she’s not going to put him out of his misery with a merciful slug, as she did with his horse.

It would be easier.

But she can’t. Not if she wants to keep her land, her livelihood, and her liberty.

_Damn it._

Slinging her shotgun into its carrying holster over her shoulder, Rey crawls up the slope until she’s level with the injured man, the shapes of rocks imprinting her knees and smearing her trousers with silt. His breathing is shallow, but the fingers she places under his ear find his pulse beating strongly enough.

Well, that’s...good.

_Damn, damn, damn._

She curses much more inventively to herself after she locates the man’s outflung wrist and follows it up his arm to his shoulder, when she encounters the full magnitude of his deadweight. She hefts at his body, rolling him marginally higher on the hillside with a straining huff so that when her taut muscles release him, gravity brings his shoulder thudding down onto her own. Gritting her teeth, Rey tucks his arm around her neck to keep him relatively upright and begins a crab-like descent back to the valley, heels braced against the slope’s shifting rubble, uncomfortable friction heating her ass. That useful, damnable gravity bears the man down at her side, half-draped over her.

Crushing her.

Given his broken leg, this descent isn’t any more pleasant for him than it is for her. But at least he doesn’t have to be conscious while it happens. Rey decides she’s entitled to feel a bit more sorry for herself than for him.

“Kneel,” she pants to Little Bee when her heels thunk down onto flat ground once more and the man sags against her, almost prone.

Obediently, the mustang folds his forelegs to lower his withers and Rey’s saddle.

“Thank you.”

Once she’s regained her breath and a hint of strength in her aching arms, Rey hitches the man across her shoulder again. She drags him to the kneeling Little Bee and eases him over the mustang’s saddle like a flour sack or a bedroll. Her gentleness isn’t for his broken leg; she doesn’t want to hurt Little Bee by dropping two hundred-fifty pounds onto his back without warning.

Because this man is a damn giant. His ankles and wrists dangle inches from the ground, swishing through tall grasses when Rey coaxes Little Bee upright and leads him away from the pastures and the calving enclosure, back toward the shanty.

She needs to keep watch on her cattle and the new calf she knows was born tonight, but she won’t have any cattle left to tend if this man dies. Not with a gunshot wound making a bloody gape in his thigh through his trousers, awfully distinct from the ragged flesh around his fracture. No way to disguise it.

So she leads a shuffling, patient, ox-strong Little Bee to her shanty’s porch. If the wolves return tonight, they’ll likely feed first on the horse’s carcass before coming for Rey’s new calf. Easier pickings than braving lashing hooves from enraged cattle, which can kick both back and sideways. She’ll have to hope for that outcome, at least.

_Sweet lord, grant me this._

Grabbing the man around his waist, Rey hauls him from Little Bee’s saddle and props him onto her porch’s splinter-strewn boards, then untacks the mustang and rubs him down in the barn. Stalling for time. But finally she has to return to the shanty. To the man.

No matter how much she wants to go over her tack with saddle soap and a rough cloth, buffing away the blood and dirt that the man’s left behind, scrubbing at her saddle as she can’t scrub at herself—absolve herself of the dead horse’s blood on her hands and conscience—she doesn’t have the time.

Because the man’s bleeding all over her front steps. And if she waits, he’ll bleed out there.

Rey sighs and Little Bee echoes her, whuffling alfalfa dander down her jacket’s front. Rey bows her forehead to his, rubbing her frown against the mustang’s wiry forelock.

Unpleasant tasks don’t ever go away. They just get worse the longer she waits to tackle them. _Branding calves. Skinning rabbits with her child’s hands. Stitching up her forearm with a needle and thread unraveled from the hem of her shabby, too-small frock when she’d caught her elbow in barbed wire._ Groaning in a fair imitation of the broken-legged man, Rey leaves Little Bee and strides back to the shanty. She drapes the man across her shoulders again and drags him over the threshold into her single tiny room.

He’s the first man ever to enter her home. _Uninvited. Unwanted._

Scowling and staggering under his deadweight, Rey already hates him for this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for coming along on this rodeo of a fic with me! Whew, it's gonna be a bumpy ride, folks.
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	2. Chapter 2

_Drunk_.

He’s...drunk.

Ren is very, very drunk when he lapses back to consciousness. Which is damn confusing, because what the _hell_? He can’t piece together the past twelve hours. His body’s one massive, splitting headache, but even with the concussed throbbing between his temples, it doesn’t feel like an ordinary hangover...and then the first bright shards of pain break through his alcoholic haze, and he almost screams at a searing agony shredding his left leg.

He remembers.

“So,” someone says.

Anguish, alcohol, and probably that concussion have blurred his vision, but the voice isn’t a familiar one. The person speaking beside him is a stranger.

And a woman.

“More?”

A bottle’s curved glass lip brushes against his mouth. He needs to think...needs to know what’s happened...what’s happening _now_ …how...why...but instead, he just moans.

“I couldn’t get you to safely swallow too much while you were unconscious. I didn’t want to choke you,” the woman’s voice continues. The bottle tilts up so that liquid sloshes over Ren’s tongue. It burns. _Whiskey_. He coughs once, a shuddering movement that wracks through his entire body. _No_ , he can’t drink, he has to clear his head—but then the cough’s ongoing reverberations spur him to suck the alcohol desperately down—anything to dull the horrific pain lacing the entirety of his left side. Tears leak between the creases of his eyes and drip back into his hair.

He won’t cry in front of her, whoever this woman is. He’s Kylo Ren, and he doesn't cry.

But the pain is too much. He can’t help it.

“I can get morphine from the town,” she’s saying while Ren’s mouth trembles against the urge to whimper or vomit. “I know you’re hurting, but I didn’t want to leave you on your own before you regained consciousness naturally. I can put you under again with ether until I come back.”

 _Ether_. A surgeon’s drug.

“How...long?” he manages to choke out, his throat raw with whiskey and grating breaths. God, he’s so damn helpless before this pain. But he can’t lose consciousness again. He can’t afford to.

“More than an hour. Can you last?”

“Don’t…not the ether…”

“It might be better. You won’t heal as well if you’re not comfortable. I’ll need to set your leg, and you’ll have to let your bones knit. But if you’re sure.” The whiskey bottle breaches his lips again. He gulps at the fiery liquid. “It’s going to be difficult if you’re thrashing around. Can you lie still? I need to see whether the bullet’s still lodged in your thigh. Then I’ll splint the break.”

“...isn’t…” He’s been shot before. He knows the searing-cold burn of a slug that’s buried in flesh, a slug that needs to be extracted with pliers before infection sets in. Sometimes, if he’s unlucky, he’s had to dig out a bullet with his bare fingers. But this time, there’s no slug. The rifle’s shot must’ve gone clean through his thigh. Which means it would’ve struck…

“My...horse?”

Whiskey sloshes in its bottle. “I’m sorry,” the woman says. “Now, I need to be sure about the slug. Do you want something to bite down on?”

Ren makes a colossal effort to shake his head. “Went straight through...my leg. I know what...a bullet...feels like if it’s...stuck…”

“You’ve been shot before, then.” The woman offers him whiskey for the third time, but Ren drinks only a little before lifting his tongue against the roof of his mouth, diverting away the alcohol’s flow.

He needs to think, and pain’s a better stimulant than whiskey...has to be sharp…find out who she is...where he is...why...has to open his eyes...

“Who are you?” he gets out, teeth gritted so hard he draws blood from his lips.

“No one, really.” _Not your angel of mercy_. The whiskey bottle clinks as it’s set down on something wooden, probably a table. “But I’m called Rey. And you can call me...Rey.”

 _That’s generous_ , he wants to quip on genetic instinct. He moans instead.

“You’re sure you don’t want the ether and morphine? It’s going to hurt when I set your break.”

He does. He wants morphine like he’s dying from its lack. Pain can kill. But if this woman— _Rey_ —rides into Sweet Springs, she’ll see posters with his face sketched in scowling ink across them, and she’ll know.

He scratches out a nod to answer her—against a pillow?—while his body screams a denial.

“That’s your choice, then…” and she hesitates. Her silence is a prompt, echoing through the vast, unmapped wilderness of his agony-striated brain.

 _Ben_ , he almost says.

 _No_.

 _Ren_.

Hell _no_.

But any name is better than this lengthening, incriminating silence. So, “Matthew,” he tells her.

“All right, Matthew.” She sounds skeptical, but doesn’t challenge him.

Perhaps Rey isn’t her real name, either. It’s an odd one, certainly. She has a pretty voice, he thinks, lapsing in and out of coherence as agonizing ripples from spasming muscle contractions radiate up his leg. _Concussion. Alcohol_. A voice for a Christine or a Belle. _Rey_ —it’s a sharp, hurtling knife of a sound. Like a rifle’s rapport.

Rifle...shotgun...marksman…

“How’d you find me?” he struggles to articulate around his whiskey-dulled tongue.

“I was shooting at wolves coming for my herd in the pasturelands,” Rey tells him. “Somehow I must’ve hit you, too. You were on the ridge?”

It’s not an apology. _If he’s stupid enough to cross her line of fire, he deserves to be shot._ A brutal logic, but he’s in no state to contest it.

“Yes. I was...riding down to the valley…”

“That’s mad. Traversing that trail in the dark?”

Ren mumbles something and nothing, hoping his maundering sounds serve for an answer. There’s no good reply to make. Tackling the ridge trail _was_ madness, but he was desperate...they were desperate.

His gang. His responsibility. Men that he’s chosen...not like family. Can almost trust them.

“Where you alone?” she asks, terrifyingly topical.

 _Solo_ , in the Spanish.

He’d like to say _no_ , deny any bindings to that tainted name, but he has to say—“Yes.”

“Hmm.” A considering noise. “So no one knows you’re here.”

“Where’s _here_?”

“Five miles outside Sweet Springs. Do you know the town?”

“No.” Single-syllable lies are easier when the whiskey wants to spill other words or whimpers over his tongue. He clamps his teeth against the compulsion and against hot tides of pain from his leg.

Another contemplative noise. A little snort through her nose? He turns his head, eyelids struggling to rise, but a rough, chapped hand pushes his cheek back.

“No. You won’t want to watch this.”

“Watch what—”

His words splinter off as a horrific pressure descends on his left leg. He can’t help it—he screams, high and long, spine arching.

“You should’ve let me dose you with ether.” There’s fierce determination and an utter lack of sympathy in the woman’s voice. A second jerk to his broken limb nearly washes him over his fractured mind’s precipice. Ren barely clings to consciousness.

“No, stay with me,” she commands, as though she’s crept inside his head and witnessed his tidal pull into the gray beyond. “I need you to tell me when the bones are aligned. I’m not used to working on”—a grunt—“people. Cows’ conformation is— _ugh_ —easier. And they don’t complain so much.”

“I thought—you wanted to put me under w-while you did this!” he grinds out when the pressure from her hands abates for a moment, his voice cracking like a child’s.

“Well, since you’re awake, you might as well be useful. Ready for the next pull?”

“ _No!_ ”

She pulls anyway. There’s an awful, sliding _crunch_ that reverberates from the broken bones, through muscle and sinew up his leg, through his hip, and into his chest.

The noise he makes isn’t even human—

And abruptly, the compression stops.

“Oh.” Rey’s hands release him. She sounds mildly surprised and a little pleased. “I think that’s done it. Not as hard as I’d imagined.”

 _Not for you!_ he screams within his skull, tears streaming between pinched eyelids. Salty bile pools in his mouth; his teeth have sheared halfway through his tongue.

And time lapses with pulses of blood behind his incisors...

Fabric rips in a nauseating sound, jerking him back to consciousness. Rey’s hands are on his leg again, splinting it from thigh to ankle with rigid, unyielding strips of wood. Fence stakes? She straps these braces on either side of his fragile bones with a tightly knotted cloth binding, creating a makeshift cast. Her silent competence is both mortifying and terrifying as she works over him, ignoring his blood-muffled bleats of pain while she patches something tacky—plaster?—over the bullet’s entry and exit wounds.

“You’re going to be fine,” she tells him when he groans so fiercely that bile leaks over his lips. “Keep weight off this leg for a month, and you’ll be set to continue on wherever you were going.”

“A month?” Ren gurgles through the blood and saliva in his cheeks. He can’t afford a month of waiting, sitting on his ass in isolation while his crew—

“This isn’t a clean break,” she says. “If you were a cow, I’d put you down.”

It’s not even a threat from her. Just a fact.

Who the hell _is_ she?

A damn fine shot, that’s certain. Better with animals than people, from her manners. Not that he’s one to talk. And she’s nursing his broken bones for some reason. Whatever that reason is, she’s not pleased about it.

No, he knows this, because she...she thinks she’s shot him.

And she doesn’t know who he is.

 _Wait_ , his bandana—if she’s been feeding him whiskey to dim his pain, he must not be wearing the black fabric over his jaw, concealing the distinctive cast of his chin, mouth, and nose. Which means she’s seen his uncovered face.

Those goddamn sketches. Badly drawn, but recognizable. And he’s ugly as sin, not a face she’ll forget.

He needs to get the hell away. Back to his gang so they don’t forget who leads them, so their stupidity doesn’t tempt them too far. To the men he commands. This gang—something he’s made on his own, turning Leia Organa's own worst fears against her.

But Ren can’t move. Even splinted so tightly that the pain is a manageable throb, his left leg’s almost useless. And his wrists...are tied. His hands flex in instinctive panic as he realizes this, arms stretched apart over his head and bound against what feel like bedposts.

“Yes,” Rey says. That’s all, but it’s enough to tell him that she has no immediate plans to release him. “You need to stay still.”

“You’ve tied me down!”

“It works with cattle.”

Under this insult, he finally manages to crank open his salt-crusted eyelids to glare at her, tongue forming a crushing retort through bloody spittle...and stops. Because copious slugs of whiskey have softened the edges of his vision with a golden glaze. And his half-lowered eyelashes frame the woman beside him in an invasively intimate portrait. So instead of snapping at her, he just looks.

It’s not that he’s rendered speechless.

Kylo Ren is never speechless.

But perhaps Matthew is.

She’s sitting in a rocking chair beside the bed—from the pillow and posts, it must be a bed—where given his bound wrists and useless leg, she’s essentially hogtied him. She’s bent forward with elbows on her knees. Her hands are bloody from her gruesome work on his leg. The gore smears a pair of men’s trousers, probably from where she’s cleaned her palms on her thighs, but she’s rolled up her shirtwaist to keep the sleeves clean. Her tanned, freckled wrists are exposed. Scarred, too. From tangling in barbed wire? She’s regarding him over steepled fingers, eyebrows lowered in a frown above a disdainful nose tilted slightly upward. That same frown compresses her mouth, tucking its corners and marking out two dimples low on her work-browned cheeks. Fine tendrils of honeyed hair spiral over her ears, catching in sun-bleached eyelashes lining gray irises. Brown? No, green. Some peculiar color—making his head spin.

It’s the whiskey.

But that whiskey murmurs to him, an insidious voice worming into his brain and implanting words under his skull where he can’t dig them out again:

_She’s terrifying._

_And terrifyingly beautiful_.

It’s a blessing when he finally, _finally_ passes out again, his eyes still on hers.

—

Rey’s grateful when the man’s head drops back and his eyes roll softly up. His long, pale face relaxes, full lips easing from strained white to a delicate color that Rey would almost call _rouge_ on a woman. Ebony eyebrows unwrinkle from their crooked curves. Smoothed out from a pained scowl, his dark widow’s peak points to a ridged, jutting nose above a pliant mouth. It’s only a change in expression and the fleeing dawn shadows mingling with rising daylight, but suddenly he looks younger. He’s all hard angles with stark dots of moles on his forehead and cheeks, but in unconsciousness those angles yield subtly, revealing a single dimple in his chin.

 _Matthew_.

This isn’t his name, and she knows it. But it doesn’t matter. He is who he is—and right now, he’s unconscious.

Which is good, because she needs to check on her cattle.

Rey gives the knots around his wrists another tug, making certain of their strength against the bedposts. Her bedstead is hewn from solid pine slabs, which should be heavy enough to hold any ordinary person stationary—yet as she’s noted, this man is absolutely massive. And he’s brutally strong in the depths of panic and pain.

But her knots are tight, and they give no quarter under her questing tugs. _Good_. Rey grabs her jacket and strides out to the barn again, clicking her tongue on her teeth to rouse Little Bee.

A quick gallop down to the pastures through a crimson sunrise painting arcs of color on the hillsides, and her calving enclosure comes into view. Rey’s herd is drowsing, tails twitching against the day’s first flies or cropping lazily at always-greener grasses through the split-rail fencing. The cattle are calm.

And from somewhere in the middle of the herd comes the bleating cry of a hungry calf.

 _Thank you, sweet lord_.

Rey dismounts and drops Little Bee’s reins to the ground in a hitch without hobbles. Planting a boot on the bottom fence rail, she hops into the enclosure, patting rumps and pushing against shoulders as she passes, soothing the cattle with a song low in her throat so that the man’s blood on her clothes doesn’t spook them. She moves gradually among the bovine bodies with gentling hands and her crooning song until she approaches the herd’s center, where the most vulnerable animals seek shelter.

There—an afterbirth’s fading stain in the flat-trampled grasses.

“Where are you, girl?” she calls in her same soothing voice. The noises she makes with her song let the cow know she’s coming; she’s careful not to frighten this new mother as she steps over the afterbirth, toward an animal with marks of sweat on her ribs and between her rear legs in a bloody mottle. “There you are. My good girl. And where’s your little one?”

A wobbly-legged calf is stumbling around on knees unaccustomed to holding her upright, bawling while the cow sidles to present her udder to the greedy mouth. But the calf can’t seem to hold herself up on her spindly legs for long enough to latch onto her mother’s dugs. Her muzzle repeatedly collides with the cow’s stomach or flank, missing the teats. Desperate to nurse, weakening with her futile efforts so that her attacks upon her mother’s milk become less and less potent, she whines her frustration and hunger.

“Shhh…you’re all right.”

Rey kneels and catches the calf around her belly and under her chin. After wrestling with Matthew’s leaden body, this gangly creature seems to weigh hardly anything. She lifts the little one and carries her to the cow’s side, keeping one arm around her belly and guiding her muzzle to the mother’s dugs. A pinch of her fingers opens the calf’s mouth, and then the baby abruptly latches onto the nearest teat in a sudden frenzy. She butts against the cow’s udder, and her mother adjusts her position so that the calf is half-sheltered under her stomach. Milk flows freely, dribbling over the calf’s chin. Her tiny, bristled tail twitches in satisfaction.

 _Good_. Smiling, Rey braces her hands against her thighs and stands.

At least something’s gone right in the past twelve hours.

Scratching foreheads and under chins, she walks through the rest of her herd, but the calf she’s helped to nurse is the only new arrival. Several of her other cows are heavily pregnant, though, so she’ll keep her rocking-chair watch again tonight; she’ll be ready with her shotgun to run off the wolves, or to sink her arm elbow-deep in a birthing cow’s channel, dragging a breeched calf into the world.

It’s not as though she could go to bed, anyhow. Not with Matthew fastened to the bedposts on her narrow straw-tick mattress.

Which reminds her: the wolves and the horse.

Hopping out of the calving arena, Rey calls for Little Bee and leads him to the dead wolf beside her fencing. After all, buffalo wolf pelts are valuable. The mustang folds to his knees while she heaves the carcass across her saddlebow, his hide barely twitching at the invading scents of predatory death that Rey slings over his withers.

“That’s my boy,” she praises him.

Along with the wolf’s body, she retrieves the tack and saddlebags from Matthew’s horse and loads them onto Little Bee, then guides the mustang back to the barn. After relieving him of his burdens and her own riding equipment, Rey hitches him into a plowing harness that she’s cobbled together from scrap leather and faulty farrier rings discarded in Sweet Springs. Riding bareback with a shovel in hand, she knees him along a return to the flatlands. She digs a shallow grave at the nearest hillside’s base. Instead of pulling a plow, Rey and her mustang drag the dead horse and a second wolf carcass into the depression. These bodies can’t be left in the open—they’ll only attract predators with an enticing, putrid odor of decay.

“I’m sorry,” she tells the animals she buries, shoveling dirt over them with an ache in her shoulders and her gut. “But your deaths weren’t for nothing. Your bodies will feed new life under the soil. Thank you.”

She can’t afford to be more sentimental than this.

_That obedient horse, coming down the ridge in pitchy darkness under his rider’s heels and hands. Trusting._

_The wolf, following its instincts._

It’s not their fault that they’re dead. Wolves and men like Matthew coming west...something’s driving them. Rey grunts, dumping another shovel of loam across the wolf’s pelt. Something’s driving them, and she has to stop it.

She’s good at killing, but she shouldn’t have to be.

_Well, when has life ever been fair?_

Rey gives another grunt with her shovel and a bitter laugh.

Returning to the shanty, she drags her purloined buffalo wolf carcass onto the porch for skinning later in the afternoon. One canid is enough; careful not to waste anything, she’ll stew the flesh after she’s cured its hide, though she dislikes the taste of carnivores. Then Rey hauls Matthew’s gear inside the shanty to see what she can learn from his saddlebags while he’s unconscious—

But he’s not unconscious anymore. And he’s worked one wrist free from his restraints, mouth gritted with concentration while he pries one-handed at the second set of knots.

Rey drops his satchels and lunges at him, pinning his liberated wrist and yanking it back against its bedpost. “ _No!_ ” she cries while she attacks with nails and elbows and knees, shouting denials or other words, furious and vicious syllables. “Don’t you—stay—don’t—” It takes barely ten seconds for her to overpower him, injured as he is. Then she glares at the man spreadeagled on her mattress, tied safely down again, her chest heaving with overwrought exertion. “You—how _dare_ —”

“Did you think I wouldn’t try to get free?” The man’s face is clammy and ashy pale with fresh-woken pain. He spits the words at her through blood in his mouth. “Isn’t that what you’d try to do?”

“You don’t have my permission to be anywhere but _right the hell there!_ This is _my_ place—”

“I didn’t ask you to help me.”

“Well, I am!”

“You’re holding me captive.”

“I’m keeping you from hurting me and mine,” she fumes. “You think I’m not suspicious of your coming down the ridge to the pasturelands at night, _Matthew_? You think it hasn’t crossed my mind that you might be a rustler?”

“I’m not—”

“You haven’t told me a single true thing. So why should I trust you enough to release you on my land?”

“You think I can do any damage with a broken leg?”

“That splint’s a good one. You’ll be a mobile enough soon.”

“So why help me?”

“Protecting me and mine,” she snaps at his idiocy. _Men_. “If word gets to the sheriff that I shot you—”

“You think—” But Matthew chokes off his words before he finishes. And then he eyes her with naked, black-eyed calculation. “So it’s guilt.”

“Self-defense.”

He scoffs and shifts his weight. A sudden crease delves between his eyebrows, and his breath hisses through his teeth. He fights for a moment, then sags back onto Rey’s mattress in defeat. “I think you’ve got the upper hand here. Literally.” He twitches his fingers where both wrists are strapped to the bedposts again.

Trying for humor against his pain?

Against her anger?

Rey returns his frown for a silent breath. But then she decides on her next course of action as she always decides, quickly and forcefully. “More whiskey?”

“How much do you have?”

 _Too much._ From when she’d gotten herself falling-down drunk to forget. A bottle each day. Sometimes more. But she’s stronger than that, now. She’s older, and harder.

“Enough to last,” she tells him.

“Until what?”

Rey tilts her chin toward his leg.

“Hell, you aren’t planning to keep me here until the bone knits—”

“Until you won’t bring the lawmen down on me, and I can see you properly off my ranch.”

“The lawmen on _you_?” He laughs, coughs, and groans.

Wordlessly, Rey uncorks her bottle and tilts whiskey into his mouth. Amber liquid spills in a bloom over his lips, trickling down his chin.

Swallowing and sputtering, he clears his throat. “Will I be tied up the whole time?”

“Give me a reason to trust you.”

“Do you ever trust anyone, Rey?” His tone makes his doubt clear.

“Then you know my answer.” She corks the whiskey and replaces it on a narrow shelf in the few square feet of her shanty that serve for a kitchen. Grabbing down a can of tinned beans and a knife to pry off the lid, Rey nods at Matthew’s satchels discarded on the threshold. “But you can make a start by telling me what I’m going to find in those.”

“That’s a hard bargain.”

Rey shrugs, digging her knife’s point into the bean tin, working the blade through the thin metal cover until it pops loose. Yes, she drives a hard bargain. Of course she does. There’s not another option for a woman in her position. Snatching up a spoon, she shovels the congealed, salty breakfast into her mouth…and realizes: she’s going to have to feed this man.

Grudgingly, mashing beans between her molars, she asks him, “Are you hungry?”

“Are you going to poison me?”

“I’m trying to keep you alive.”

Trying to hide the fact that she’s shot a man. Hide this until he can leave her ranch behind with no evidence of his injury. Conceal the damage to his leg and her part in causing it. Give no foothold to men in town seeking to snatch her herds and pastures with the law’s weight on their side. Or by other means.

But Matthew just twitches his eyebrows at her.

“Fine. Do you want these beans, or other beans?” She jabs her spoon at the rows of identical tins lining her kitchen shelf.

“That’s it? That’s all?”

“I’m not making you a steak.”

“Not going to waste good meat on me?”

“I’m not turning my back on you again, that’s what.”

“Then what _are_ you planning to do?”

Rey advances on him with a new bean tin and her knife. She licks her spoon clean—she only has the one—and jabs at his chin. “Open.” She pries at the can’s lid, working with her blade perilously close to Matthew’s face, then scoops up a runny legume portion. She pokes it into his mouth.

His lips close over the spoon. Sucking the beans’ juices from the metal like he’s starving, he doesn’t immediately release her utensil. Rey tugs against the clamp of his teeth before the spoon slides free. The bowl polishes against his ruddy lower lip.

A sudden shudder works its way up her spine.

Scowling, Rey digs into the tin and splats another mouthful onto his tongue, muscling past his reluctant lips. He doesn’t catch at the spoon again.

 _Good_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out this absolutely _stunning_ [Rey and Ren](https://mrsvioletwrites.tumblr.com/post/175655113633/day-7-holiday-for-day-7-of-reyloveweek-i) that the incredible MrsViolet created for RESS! 
> 
> *swoons*

Around mid-morning, Rey unties him from the bedposts and frog-marches him to the privy. She doesn’t ask whether he needs to use the facilities. She just takes him, and expects him to make use of the opportunity. So he does, because when will she next let him up? She waits outside the lean-to door while he struggles to unfasten his trousers and suspenders, balanced on one leg, light-headed with the strong, antiseptic odor of lime from where she’s scrubbed her outhouse to a rigorous cleanliness. Walking from the shanty to the privy was barely possible with her rigid, upright figure braced under his arm, but he overbalances on his own inside the tar-papered shack.

Obviously, he doesn’t ask her to help him.

After their stop at outhouse, Rey hauls Ren along to a snug, well-conditioned barn; it’s in much better shape than her shanty, with chinking in the walls and barrels of fragrant feed that smell a damn sight more appetizing than the tinned beans currently congealing in his gut. Three stalls line the left wall—one inhabited by a particolored chestnut-and-white mustang gelding with an ugly Roman nose and sleek sides, the other by a drowsy blue roan mule. The third stall is piled high with bales of cut alfalfa hay, insulating the barn and providing richer fodder than grazed grasses for these working animals.

The mule raises her head at Rey’s approach for the woman to scratch beneath her chin, whuffling into Rey’s palm. But then her eyes roll to Ren as he adjusts his stance without Rey’s shoulder to prop him on his feet. Her pleasure-fluttering eyelids snap up and her lips curl. She looses a deafening bray, spewing saliva and deadening his ears. He chokes in disgust and surprise, stumbling back and grabbing at the mustang’s stall door for balance.

When the ringing in his ears dims and he’s wiped off his face, he looks up to find Rey patting the mule’s neck in approval. “You two will get along just fine, I can tell.”

The  _hell_?

Lifting the stall door’s latch, Rey clicks her tongue to the animal, who follows her onto the barn floor. While Ren scrubs his spittle-flecked hands clean against his good thigh, Rey runs a bristly brush over the mule's withers, raises dust on her flanks in brown, gritty clouds, tackles her hooves with a curved pick, then swings up a woven blanket and saddle onto her back.

“You’ll likely need to mount up from the right,” Rey mentions while she coaxes a bit between the mule’s teeth, easing a bridle’s headstall over the creature's jackrabbit ears.

“ _What_ —you don’t seriously expect me to ride that thing? My leg—”

“I’m not leaving you alone, and I need to check on my cattle. So you’re coming with me. Millie’s a little chary of strangers, but I think you’ll do all right.” Rey waits for a beat, then continues, “By which I mean, she’ll swing around and bite you if you try anything clever. So don’t.”

She offers him no choice, tossing over the mule’s reins and jerking her chin for Ren to mount up on his good leg.

“I…” This is insane.

“You ride, or I tie you on. Your choice.”

A second saddle draped over her arm, this one with a shotgun’s sheath tucked under the right leg flap, Rey grooms and tacks up the mustang. She swings into her stirrups, gathering her reins in a practiced grip. Towering over Ren on her little horse, she eyes him sideways from beneath her hat’s shadowed brim; he’s standing flat-footed on the stable floor, still trying to figure out how in hell he’s supposed to mount up.

“Do you need a leg?”

He doesn’t need a damn leg up, like a woman or a child.

But he’s not going to make it onto the mule’s back under his own steam.

Sighing at his grudging, ornery silence, Rey clicks her tongue against her teeth again. “Kneel, Millie.”

Muttering to herself through flaring nostrils, the mule folds her forelegs and sinks down beside Ren, coating her freshly-brushed knees with alfalfa dander. Rey points to the saddle placed at sitting height beside him. “Get on.”

It’s a trial. She’s evaluating how mobile he is with his strapped splint.

Evaluating whether he’s a threat.

He doesn’t even have to try to convince her of his relative helplessness, floundering to get into the saddle. In the end, he ends up stagger-hopping to the mule’s left side, then half-falling down onto her withers with his left leg stretched out, heaving his right knee over the saddlehorn until he’s astride.

“Up now,” Rey calls to the mule. With a groan, the animal lumbers upright. Ren has to grab his saddlehorn like a novice to keep from slipping sideways and crashing to the barn floor.

It’s humiliating.

Rey’s smile is grim and satisfied, a curve of pale teeth through the shadows beneath her hat.

She nudges her mustang out of the barn and sets a walking pace down to the pastures—for which Ren is resentfully grateful. Even the slowest, smoothest jog-trot would unseat him, ripping apart his throbbing left leg into broken segments. And he’s damn sure that this mule isn’t gaited. He grapples for balance, his weight's uneven distribution leaving him with no mental capacity to do anything but cling to the saddlehorn with one hand and faintly neck-rein the mule with the other. If the animal bucks or even changes gaits unexpectedly, he’ll come tumbling—and screaming—off her back.

Fortunately, his borrowed mount is sedate enough when she’s not braying or spitting. She stops often to graze while wandering down a well-worn path to an arena of split-rail fences forming a calving enclosure. Ren grits his teeth and braces his right boot into his stirrup, his other leg hanging uselessly. His left foot is bare, either from when Rey cut away his left trouser leg to set the broken bones, or from his descent down the ridge where he’d lost his rifle, his dignity, and his liberty.

He feels ridiculous.

Chomping grassy foam around her bit, the mule continues to graze while Rey and her mustang lope around the herd’s perimeter. But a sudden switch from the reverberations of a three-beat canter to a pounding, single-footed gallop shakes the animal from her composed cropping. Her enormous ears swivel.

“ _Damn it!_ ” comes a shout.

“Don’t you dare,” Ren warns the mule, gathering up his reins when a quiver skitters over her hide. She backs and sidles against the pressure on her bit, muzzle swinging around with grass-stained teeth exposed. “I’m not trying anything clever!” he tells her in exasperation, his own teeth on edge with anticipation of pain shearing through his leg if she rears or bucks. He cranes his neck, but can’t see across the herd. “What’s—”

A wordless cry sounds over the arena, stirring the drowsing cattle—a hallooing _yip_. Then, “Get on, now. Back, _back!_ ” A cow bawls. The herd shifts. “ _Damn it!_ ” again, a breathless bark.

Cautiously—very cautiously—Ren presses his right heel to the mule’s side, steering her along the fenceline. He holds his reins braced into a bridge against her suspicious intentions until Rey and her mustang come into view. Rey’s dismounted and on foot, heaving at a rail that’s been knocked loose from the fence. She’s glaring at a nearby steer. If looks could kill...steak would be in the offering.

“You _have_ grass, you idiot! There was no”—a grunt—“need to push over my rails just to get at a stupid clover patch—” Swearing under her breath, mouth twisting around what looks to be a whole host of inventive epithets, Rey hauls at the fence rail.

“Rey—” Ren calls to catch her attention. He points to another rail tilting precariously out of its sockets a few yards distant from where she stands. Possibly from the steer’s first attempt at rovering after the clover? Crossed posts forming the fence’s vertical supports are loose in the dirt, leaning inward. One good blow from a horned head will break the segment apart.

Startled out of her swearing concentration, Rey drops the rail she’s been wrangling straight onto her foot. A strangled noise erupts from her pain-pressed lips. “ _Damn_ it!” Hopping and cursing, she clutches the toe of her crushed boot and glares at him.

“There’s another weak rail—”

“Did I _ask_ for your advice?” she snarls.

Ren bristles. He’s trying to be helpful, isn’t he? After everything she’s done to him? “Fine, I’ll just—”

“Stay out of my way. If I wanted your help, I would’ve asked for it.”

The mule brays at that—an exclamation point.

“Exactly,” Ren mutters at the same time that Rey does. A moment of surprise at their synchronicity, and then they glower at each other, each daring the other to comment.

Huffing, Rey breaks their contact after a scowling pause. She turns back to her rail. Groaning resourceful curses under her breath, she manages to drag one of its ends into position, squatting with straining muscles in her thighs and taking the plank’s weight across her shoulders until she can lift the far end. The rail slots into place between its crossed supports and she staggers back, having repaired the fence unaided.

Well, mostly.

Her shoving, heaving work has reverberated down the rest of the fenceline, unsettling a precarious half-balance that other vertical posts have kept after the steer’s assault.

“No, no, no…” she mutters, reaching out her hands in a futile command for stillness as the fence creaks, rails shifting.

 _Dominoes_.

But Rey’s clearly not about to let the calving enclosure topple on her watch. She snatches up a lasso looped around her mustang’s saddlehorn and casts a noose over the nearest wobbling post. Shoulders tensed, heels digging creases into the pasture’s soil, she heaves at the rope—but the fence continues to teeter. She’s not strong enough to hold the whole collapsing contraption together with just the muscle in her arms and the determination marking her lips.

Of course she isn’t. She’s a small woman.

This is a man’s work.

Ren’s ready to kindly point this out when her grip on the lasso’s tail eases. Defeat? No—tilting her head, Rey spares a panting breath to chirp at her mustang. The horse trots to her side. She loops the rope’s end around her saddlehorn, relieving the strain on her arms and taking the fence’s pressure on the saddle instead. Another click of her tongue in a little whistle, and the mustang sinks his haunches low to the grass. He begins to back away from the enclosure, dragging its posts upright as he’d drag along a recalcitrant cow, step by step.

It’s working—Rey’s fixed her fence with nothing but perseverance, leverage, and a mustang small enough to a pony, her rails falling into alignment—but then the same clover-hungry steer bumps up along the arena’s shifting posts again. Just like that, the careful balancing act fails. Rail after rail spills to the ground.

“No, damn it!” Rey stamps her crushed foot, grunts, and jogs on one leg, massaging her abused toes. “Damn, damn, damn! Don’t you dare laugh—”

Ren keeps silent, more frustrated than amused. There’s a simple way to repair her fence. But she’s ordered him not to offer help if she hasn’t asked for it.

“And don’t just sit there, judging me!”

Well damn, he can’t do anything right with this woman. If that’s the case, what does he really have to lose by offering? “Give me the rope. I’ll exert the leverage, and you can guide the rails back into place.”

Her perspiring face contorts. “I’m fine.”

He shrugs.

Rey returns to her single combat with the rails, hefting them into their sockets, building up her enclosure like a card-shark with an airy paper castle—only to see the rough-hewn planks come tumbling down again. Watching her, Ren’s impressed as much as he is annoyed; it takes Rey nearly a half-hour of swearing and struggling before she steps back with sagging knees and shoulders, contemplating the ruin of her fence, panting and worn out. Sweat-soaked hair curls over her collar from beneath her rancher’s hat. She’s discarded her jacket to work in her shirtsleeves, and the fabric is nearly transparent with perspiration, sticking to cords of muscle in her back and arms. She wears no corset; he can count each knob in her spine from the nape of her neck to her trousers’ waistband. No breast-band, either. She’s very strong and willful to a fault...but not strong enough.

Not alone.

Either Rey comes to this conclusion at the same moment that Ren does, or her timing is just impeccable.

A flick of her wrist casts her lasso off the mustang’s saddlehorn. Another snap of tendons sends the loose end spinning to Ren on the mule. He snatches the rope’s tail out of the air, trying not to smirk.

“Don’t talk,” Rey tells him. “Just pull.”

Tying off the rope around his own saddlehorn in a cattleman’s hitch, Ren coaxes the mule to back away from the fence. Exerted pressure on the lassoed posts drags them upright by inches. While the mule retreats and Ren pulls, Rey attacks her rails again. Grunting, she lifts and notches them into place, crossing their ends under the supports to hold her vertical posts steady as well. One segment completed, Ren eases the tension on his rope and Rey casts it off from the posts. She snares the next set. Ren backs the mule away again, the posts rise, and Rey repairs the second set of cross-pieces with quick, sure hands, bracing her supports.

A third section. A fourth, and a fifth.

It works.

After they reassemble the seventh segment, Rey’s fence is as stable as it’s likely ever to be, given the rambling habits of her cattle. The clover-loving steer looks forlornly through the rails.

Ren grins.

Rey’s sharp look quells his smile. She tugs away his rope and coils it around her own saddlehorn again.

“You’re welcome,” he fishes.

“Huh.” She ducks through the fence. Her snort morphs seamlessly into a nasal, wailing song while she moves into the herd. Her hands run over rumps and withers, checking on pregnant cows and for any new calves.

It’s not a _thank-you_. But it’s a neutral noise.

Returning to the barn and dismounting is slightly easier than mounting up, if only because gravity is in Ren’s favor this time around. When Rey clicks her tongue for the mule to kneel, he keels off sideways from the unsteady motions of folding knees and the animal’s haunches rising above her withers as she goes down. Mercifully, he lands on his right side, cushioned in the sawdust and dander from stacked hay bales. Rey and his own iron grip on a stall door haul him upright.

“I could be more useful if I had a crutch,” he suggests while Rey shoulders him and helps him limp back to porch, up the steps—the agony of his left foot jarring against a riser grays his vision so that she has to shove him along like a crippled blind man—and into the shanty.

“Lie down,” she says by way of reply. Rey gives him a hearty shove toward the bed. Gravity’s a treacherous whore this time and drags him down on the lumpy mattress. Air expels from his chest, leaving him without the breath to groan as his splinted leg jolts against the bedstead. His wrists are tied in the instant it takes for his mind to clear from the sudden upending of his head and ass.

 _God damn it_.

The rest of the day is excruciating, and not only when the remnants of last night’s whiskey fade from his bloodstream. After knotting up his wrists, Rey leaves him hogtied on the mattress and ducks out to the porch. She wedges the shanty door open, wicking a provocative breeze across his cheeks in the stifling room. Noonday sun beats ruthlessly against her shanty’s half-finished roof, and its walls are bare, studded boards without even the barn’s alfalfa insulation to moderate the temperature inside. He’s not sure whether she’s intentionally torturing him, or just keeping watch while she gets on with her day’s work. Craning his head on the pillow, Ren can barely see the edge of her shadow on the porch.

“I won’t take responsibility if you break your neck,” she calls in through the door. “Lie still. Is that so hard for you?”

It is, when all he has to divert his attention from his pain-pulsing leg and the ghostly heat is whatever she’s doing just out of view. He’s catalogued the entire contents of her ten-feet by fourteen-feet shanty in a single sweeping look—a narrow bed that’s too strong to break, a curve-backed rocking chair with an oddly delicate quilt sewn in greens and lavenders folded over the seat, a hewn table with an oil lamp at its center, a pot-bellied stove piled with a few pieces of crockery, a shelf above it ranged with tinned beans, the whiskey bottle, and a single sack of flour, and over a spartan washstand, a few pegs driven into the far wall to hang clothes. Plain garments: a second pair of trousers, a few shirtwaists, a man's vest and frayed jacket, and a winter coat. There’s nothing to hold his interest here, except possibly for the rocking chair and its quilt...but looking at them makes him strain his neck, and he gives up when a crick works its way down his shoulders.

So instead, he focuses on Rey.

From the porch boards singing and groaning with changing pressure, he deduces that she must be hauling around something heavy. Something that outweighs her? But that doesn’t narrow it down much. Most things on the ranch probably outweigh Rey. Not that she’d let this tawdry little fact stop her from doing exactly what she wants to do. What would she have done, if he hadn’t been around to help her shore up the calving enclosure? Ren can’t picture a scenario where she could’ve done the work by herself. But then, presumably she raised the entire corral on her own. He can’t imagine how she’d done that, just as he can’t see how she would’ve worked through her fencing problem alone. But he also can’t imagine that she wouldn’t have eventually fixed the arena, once setting her mind and her shoulders to the task.

 _Somehow_.

Rey’s probably doing something equally impossible just out of view on the porch. And he wants to see what it is.

“No,” she tells him when the bedstead squeals from Ren’s wrists contorting against their bindings. As if to reinforce her message, a sudden gout of liquid spills across the boards before the shanty’s open door. A coppery odor assaults his nostrils. _Blood_.

Rey grunts. The shimmering pool spreads to drip between the porch boards with a shallow, plashing sound of water falling to earth. A ragged noise digs into Ren’s ears—a knife ripping through hide and muscle. It’s a ghastly echo that he recognizes from skinning pelts off rabbits or squirrels. Another groan.

Exertion and satisfaction.

Ren’s stomach twists.

Bloody knife in hand, Rey crosses back into the shanty while he fights to regain control of his breathing. She looks as though she’s been in a slaughterhouse, her shirt open at the throat and stained a drying rusty brown over the forearms. Reddish streaks cross her clavicles, dripping down into the unbuttoned hollow between her breasts. Her trousers are a sodden wreck. There’s a broad stripe of gore running along her cheek.

She must’ve been trying to keep herself tidy when she’d set his leg, he realizes. Unleashed now in her work, he sees also that she must’ve been trying to be gentle with him.

But he has no time to process this epiphany before she’s gone onto the porch again, hewn pegs and a mallet in hand, knife tucked casually behind her ear.

When the shanty’s front wall shudders, he’s relatively sure that she’s pounding pegs into the exterior. Something moistens and darkens a section of the unchinked boards—whatever she’s pegged up is blocking the light. And the wall...seeps. Before the unknown horror of this fully registers, Rey’s back again and grabbing another blade, this one large enough to be a butcher’s cleaver. With her same hand holding the knife, she swipes at tacky blood smeared over her forehead. The blade misses her nose by inches.

“What are you—” he starts, wide-eyed.

“You didn’t want the beans,” she says cryptically, disappearing around the door frame.

Something thunks against the porch, making the boards vibrate around their nails. And again— _thunk_. It sounds like...chopping. Too fast to be one-handed. She must be wielding both knives at once. When Rey next appears, she’s carrying an armload of meat steaks. Elbowing other crockery pieces aside, she tosses these steaks into a frying pan on her pot-bellied stove, stokes the heat, and leaves again. The porch creaks under her boots, a leaden weight bumping down the steps after her.

Has she left him alone?

Ren twists at his restraints. He eyes his saddlebags, pushed out of the way in the shanty’s cramped corner while Rey grinds through her daily work. Busy with other things, she hasn’t opened their leather flaps yet. If he can just get loose before she does—

One minute, then another. Still she doesn’t return. The aroma from her frying steaks dizzies him, blood rushing from his head to his gut, leaching away cunning in favor of simple, all-consuming hunger. The few swallows of beans Rey’s allowed him seem like a lifetime ago. Not that she’s eaten anything else either.

He closes his eyes, struggling to regain focus.

She’s there in the room when he opens them again, just in time to flip the pan-seared steaks before they burn.

“Nice to know I can walk to my smokehouse without you trying to get loose,” she says.

He doesn’t correct her, watching her scarred wrist wielding a spatula above the stove. Saliva pools over his tongue. He clears his throat with a damp gurgle. “Did you butcher something? A cow?”

“Wolf.” Rey bends and sniffs at the frying meat. Nodding, she pokes her steaks with the welding-blackened utensil and inhales deeply. “One I shot last night. The pelt’s valuable if it’s cured.” She jerks her head at the oozing wall, where she must’ve tacked up the animal’s hide. “And wolf meat’s nutritious enough. When it’s smoked, you can’t tell it apart from venison. You’re not going to turn up your nose at this, are you?”

She palpably wants him to say yes.

“It smells good,” he says instead.

Rey’s knife slices into a well-browned steak to check its doneness with unnecessary violence. Which just makes Ren lick a dry tongue over his lips.

As it turns out, Rey ends up making him a steak after all. She doesn’t try to feed it to him, though; she unfastens one of his wrists so he can sit upright with his legs swung off the bed, the mattress forming a makeshift bench. Dragging the shanty’s table over near the bedstead, she slices the meat into portions and pushes a dented tin plate at him. She doesn’t offer Ren a knife to cut the steak into smaller pieces, and he’s not fool enough to ask her. He’s just grateful to have one hand free. When she proposes whiskey, he drinks from the bottle to wash down his tough, gamey meal—until he realizes that she’s probably looking to render him unconscious again so she can get on with her chores. Not that she couldn’t dose him with ether...but she seems reluctant to do so, for some reason.

Ren moderates his drinking after this. He backwashes into the bottle more than he swallows whenever Rey lowers her suspicious eyes to spear a next bite from her plate. The echoing pain in his leg lessens fractionally, and his mind remains intact.

But it’s torture anyway, because he just has to wait.

He doesn’t protest when Rey ties up his wrist again. In fact, he tries to sleep through the broiling afternoon when she returns from swilling down the porch and sits in her rocking chair, scrubbing sandpaper over an ugly cattle brand to clean off a year’s accumulated rust. Her chair’s casters send the faintest breeze over his sweat-slicked neck where his grimy shirt is open at the collar, exposing his pulse and an edging of the dark hair curling on his chest. He concentrates on this pinpoint of comfort, and wills himself to sleep.

He needs to be awake and ready after dark.

The afternoon’s shadows inch past, lengthening with agonizing slowness until at last they eclipse daylight fading from the valley’s loftiest pinnacles. The roasting air cools. Ren’s body thrums with awareness and adrenaline as night creeps closer, until a fire in the stove’s belly and Rey’s oil lamp are almost too bright in the dim room for his eyes to bear. That’s well and good—he’s reminded to keep his lids lowered in a facsimile of sleep or unconsciousness.

 _Patience_ , he tells himself. But he’s never been good at waiting.

Fortunately, neither is Rey.

The sun’s barely fallen behind the mountains, its lines of gold and azure faded from peaks that remain snow-dusted even in summer, when she folds away her sandpaper and hangs the branding iron from a nail beside her shanty’s door.

“Matthew,” she says.

He doesn’t respond.

Her footsteps creak closer until Ren feels the radiant heat of her body beside him. He barely manages not to flinch when her quick-bitten fingernails skim over the undersides of his wrists, checking her knots. But his stillness seems to satisfy her; with another creak of footsteps, she withdraws. He cracks his eyelids a hair to see Rey grab her jacket off the rocking chair and swing her shotgun onto her shoulder.

He waits.

The shanty door slams.

Still, he waits.

Because she’s clever with the cleverness of wild things.

He isn’t disappointed when the door soundlessly eases open again, a thread of night falling across the entryway. She’s checking on him, ready to pounce if he’s falsifying his sleep or unconsciousness.

But he can play at this game, too. Ren hasn’t moved an inch.

Watchful Rey waits for several long beats from his adrenaline-spiked pulse, offering him a chance to betray himself. He declines. Ren forces his chest to rise and fall evenly, steadily, breathing out of time with his heartbeat. _Wait_. Because... _yes_ —satisfied, Rey closes the door again. Boards sing as she steps off the porch. Her shanty’s unchinked walls allow him to track her progress to the barn by a glitter of light from the lantern she carries. She enters the stable, then rides out on her mustang a short while later, trotting down toward the pasture’s calving enclosure.

Ren wishes her a hundred calves tonight.

Keep her busy and happy with her work.

He starts in on his own task now, twisting his wrists against their bindings. The knots are too tight to break, but he doesn’t have to snap them; Rey’s bed is built for someone her size, which means it’s narrow enough that his arms aren’t fully stretched when bound to the bedposts. He can roll his shoulderblades under himself, pushing over onto one bent arm while the other extends fully to accommodate his change in posture. This position brings the knot on his right wrist within range of his teeth.

If he can chew through Rey’s wolf steak, he can chew through anything.

When the first knot loosens, Ren slides his wrist out and picks apart the second with his fingers. No point in breaking his molars on Rey’s damnably tight bindings if he doesn’t have to.

Then—both hands free.

Hobbling on his good leg, gritting his teeth into his lower lip and balancing against the table, Ren drags himself across the shanty. He grabs the cattle brand for a crutch and uses it to hook his saddlebags. He hauls them along the splintered floor toward himself, then lurches onto the porch with the satchels slung over his shoulder. The steps are nearly his undoing; the agony of jarring his broken bones is so bad that he almost screams.

Almost.

He’s not going to have any tongue left if he keeps gagging himself with it this way.

Spitting out a gout of blood, Ren shambles to the barn. He braces his leg with the cattle brand to take most of his left-side weight, and he uses the saddlebags over his right shoulder to tilt his body toward his unbroken leg. Even with these aids, he’s icy cold, sweating and shaking by the time his outstretched hand grasps the stable’s latch.

But he’s fine. _He’s fine_.

Shivering with the exertion and pain, Ren pries open the barn door and limps over to the mule’s stall. He sags against the partition for a minute, just trying to breathe. _In. Out_. Shallow breaths that won’t jostle muscle and bone.

After a rest that’s not long enough but as long as he can afford, while the mule ambles near and bites at his saddlebags, while the pain drains away, it’s marginally easier to keep down his moans.

Yes. He’s fine. He’ll be better than fine if he can get to the railroad line that he’s spotted from the valley's eastern ridge. Steal medical supplies, and a team and wagon so he won't have to ride far with his broken leg. Take a path back into the mountains. Rendezvous with his crew north of Sweet Springs—the contingency plan if they got separated. The Ren Seven may not subscribe to a motto of leaving no man behind, but they also need him. There's no Ren Seven without Kylo Ren. So:

“Kneel,” Ren tells the mule with all the authority he can muster.

Recalcitrant Millie’s long-eared shape doesn’t kneel. He can practically feel the animal’s disdain, her delight in defying him. Damn it, but she’s stubborn as a...

Mule.

Classic, but he’s in no mood to appreciate the humor of his situation.

“ _Kneel_ , damn you.”

She just spits.

“Millie, I swear to Jesus _fucking_ Christ—”

And then Millie brays, a deafening _eeeee-awwwwhhhhhnnnnnn_ that echoes through the stable, through the door he’s left open, and probably across the entire goddamn valley.

Definitely to Rey.

“Traitor,” he groans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your lovely comments! I'm noticing a common theme in these threads, which is that everyone _loves_ Millie. And I can't even describe how much this tickles me. I love her, too! So she gets lots of page time going forward. :)
> 
> Here's a special [Millie Appreciation Post](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/post/175712390635/news-alert). ;)

When Millie looses her bray from the barn, a noise akin to spraying shrapnel in its force against human ears, Rey’s under no illusions about the reason for her mule’s annoyance.

 _Damn it_.

Not that she’s much surprised, even having left Matthew supposedly asleep or unconscious in the shanty and tied up beneath her strongest knots. In fact, she’d expect nothing less from this man than an escape attempt at his first real opportunity.

Spurring Little Bee up from her calving arena—rails steady in their sockets, no red-tongued predators wailing to the moon-bright sky or creeping near under silver pelts, pregnant cows still lumbering with rolling gaits prior to dropping their new calves into the world—Rey gallops back to the barn, hips bumping against her saddlebow with her urgency. There’s no need for this frantic pace. Millie won’t cooperate with strangers, and Matthew won’t get far on his own with his bad leg hampering him.

Certainly not to the next homestead or all the way to Sweet Springs, where he could alert Sheriff Canady to her transgression.

But Rey leans forward over Little Bee’s neck just the same, wiry hairs from the mustang’s mane whipping and stinging across her cheeks. A touch of her reins and a hint of pressure on his bit spins him on a dime around the barn’s wall and to a skidding stop. He’s more agile than any pedigreed quarter horse, for all his indifferent heritage.

Rey leaps out of the saddle.

“I told you Millie was chary of strangers,” she says into the stable’s darkness, unhooking a lantern from her saddlehorn and striding over the threshold, illuminating the interior where a white-lipped Matthew sags against Millie’s stall partition.

“Huh, well…” he groans.

“Did she bite you?”

“No...Punctured my eardrums, though.”

“You should’ve stayed put. It’s for your own protection, as much as mine.” Raising the lantern higher, Rey evaluates him with a frown and a shaking head. She sighs. “Well, get up.”

Bracing a palm against his thigh, Matthew winces. “I don’t...I can’t.”

“You got out to the barn on your own, so I know you can.” She marches over to him and nudges his good leg with her boot. When he doesn’t move, Rey shoves the over-bright lantern into his face. The proximity of a brilliant flame in the shadow-bound stable makes him flinch. “ _Up_.”

“I had a...crutch, before.”

“Well, what did you do with it?”

Matthew tilts his chin toward the barn’s furthest stall, where a glint of metal catches Rey’s light. It’s a three-foot pole with an engraved circular foot welded onto the end. Her branding iron. He could’ve wielded it for a weapon—struck at her as she entered, before her eyes adjusted to the stable’s dimness. The brutal tool is heavy enough to raise a sizable lump on her skull.

So why didn’t he attack? Even feebly?

She would’ve expected this.

Shaking her head again, Rey retrieves the cattle brand. She folds Matthew’s right hand around its shaft, then squats on his left, tucking his arm over her shoulders. His muscles shiver with exhaustion and pain. “Brace yourself,” she warns him. Groaning, Matthew pushes against the brand’s pole while Rey forces her thighs to bear them both, heaving him to standing with a searing cramp in her ass from his leaden weight. Even in the lantern’s flickering glow, his face visibly draws and whitens with a scream that he keeps locked behind his lips.

If nothing else, Rey has to admire his fortitude. He’s gotten himself loose from her knots, up from the bed, down the porch steps, and out to the stable with nothing but this branding iron to prop him upright and help him hobble along on his splinted leg. Yes, she has to admire that.

But not his stubbornness.

They stagger-step back to the shanty. Mounting the porch’s steep stairs, Matthew’s breath catches in his chest. He’s trying so hard not to scream that it almost hurts her to witness it. Inside, he collapses panting onto her mattress without protest. Wordlessly, Rey offers him the whiskey bottle.

He drinks like a drowning man trying to swallow the sea, clutching at the bottle’s neck with desperate fingers, upending it, amber liquid gurgling against the glass as it drains over his teeth and tongue. His throat convulses, choking and gulping, refusing to stop until his lips suck at empty air.

This man drinks like Rey used to drink.

A terrible thing.

She catches the bottle falling from his hands before it shatters.

“Better?” she asks him.

He moans. A feeble sound.

“Ether?”

“No.”

“Then I’m going to tie you up again.”

A shallow nod is his only response. His eyelids droop, gleaming with sweat. He doesn’t protest when she raises up his wrists above his head and loops them to the bedposts. Not that these ties seem to keep him down for long, but they’re some security. If he moves to break loose, she’ll hear him rustling on the straw-tick. Small insurance, but it’s all she’s going to get tonight.

Rey’s good at waking from a dead sleep, ready to fight.

And she needs to sleep. She hasn’t closed her eyes in over twenty-four hours.

Propping her cattle brand against the shanty door—its hinges swing inward, so she’ll also hear the iron clatter and fall if Matthew manages to get loose and to the threshold before she wakes—Rey blows out her oil lamp, dousing the room in a smoky dark. She curls into her rocking chair, patchwork quilt tucked over her shoulders.

The ragged cloth pieces smell like her. Rey’s sweat, the sourness of her exhaustion. Her thousand fears, and her brutal determination to survive. Just to live. _Musky_. It doesn’t smell like home anymore. But if she closes her eyes—they sting as her lids cover them, so that a thin scrim of tears line her lower eyelashes—she can pretend that she’s not here in a shabby little shanty that she’s built with her own hands and her own bloody perspiration, here with a man who could take everything from her that she’s worked so hard to keep. _To keep, and remember_. She can pretend that she’s not fighting for sleep in an upright chair that marks the knobs in her spine with wooden rods, that winches a crick into her neck where she has to crane back to rest her head. She can pretend that she’s not twenty-three and a woman alone.

She can spool back the time.

 _Eleven turns of the sun_.

She can be twelve years old again, nestled into a duck-down mattress with the warm blossom of firelight and loving arms surrounding her. Rachel Ridley with her hair in two honey-brown braids, nightgown buttoned to her chin, burrowing under quilted green-and-lavender bedclothes that smell of sunshine and starch from washing day.

_Go to sleep, my darling_

_Oh go to sleep, my dove_

_Under beams from the sun and the moonlight_

_I’ll rock you to sleep, my love_.

Her voice cracks and shatters apart whenever she tries to capture that lullaby. Instead, her singing is a broken, echoing wail to soothe the cattle, a song that raises hair along her own arms in its likeness to despair.

A forgotten child screaming.

She’d howled and cried, and the animals had quieted under her voice...

A rustle from the straw-tick jerks up Rey’s stinging eyes—but Matthew’s only shifting his weight to relieve pressure on his shoulders and hips from their enforced alignment, hands limp against their bedposts. His mouth is soft through smoke-gray phantoms falling between the shanty’s boards. Perhaps he’s asleep.

Rey doesn’t want to sleep. But she has to.

_Go to sleep, my daughter_

_Oh go to sleep, my girl_

_Under shadows of daybreak and evening_

_I’ll send you away_ —

The line’s unfinished, and she can’t remember how it ends. The rhyme. She’s heard it sung a thousand times, but she...she can’t remember.

_Stay here! I’ll come back for you, sweetheart._

A lie. She’s stayed. Eleven years.

She’s alone.

Rey’s nails dig into the seams between her quilt’s patch blocks. She presses her cheek to their folds. If she cries, it’s too dark in the shanty for anyone to see moisture stealing down over her eyelashes. Salty tears, rusting into the fabric. Years of rust.

 _There’s no one to see_ , she tells herself from brutal, desperate habit, reminding herself of who she is. Reminding herself of what she’s survived. What she's done to survive, with no shame but her own to bear.  _No one_.

But— _Matthew_.

Motionless. Breathing deep and steady. Lips slack.

Rey scowls. It isn’t fair that he can sleep. He should be restless with pain from his healing leg. But he finds a peace in unconsciousness that’s denied to her. And that makes her angry—angry at so many things. She slips into this anger like a familiar embrace—safer to clutch than her quilt, and warmer. Eventually, long after the night’s middle reaches, it guides her away.

Daybreak’s first light wakes her.

Rey is instantly alert to her surroundings when the furthest eastern mountains catch hints of maroon and gold from the rising sun, though a misty miasma still cloaks the valley. Her fingers grip the rocking chair, forcing wakefulness and strength through muscles in her arms...but the straw-tick is quiet, the cattle brand leans as she’s propped it against the shanty door, and Matthew is sprawled on the mattress where she’s left him. His mouth has fallen open. A thread of saliva slicks his lower lip and marks a tiny damp spot on the pillow.

 _Good_.

Stretching and grimacing against a crick in her neck, Rey gulps down a few bites of tinned beans to sustain her through the morning’s chores. She grabs her knives and her Spencer pump-action shotgun—no point in brazen stupidity—and leaves for her calving enclosure. She loops her belt through a clean pair of trousers, stamps her heels down into her boots, and piles up her hair beneath a rancher’s hat as she goes. She also takes the cattle brand for insurance.

Two new calves have arrived uneventfully in the night. Having cut away an umbilical cord tripping up one of the newborns, she checks both over for proper conformation. Rey runs practiced hands across their knobby knees and little faces while the calves nurse from their proud, tired mothers. All legs and tails are accounted for, and they’re both a healthy weight. One has a silly blaze striping her nose, the other a bristly white star on his forehead. They’re darling, and she already loves them as much as she loves anything.

Which is to say: cautiously, prudently, warily.

Most of Rey’s calves survive to be yearlings, but she’d be foolish to assume anything in this life.

 _Men and buffalo wolves stalking down the ridge_.

She circles her paddock, somewhat perfunctorily searching for evidence of such men or marauding coyotes. The canids’ lower, soft yips wouldn’t have announced their hunting intent as a wolf pack’s cry would, but she doesn’t expect to see their prints; coyotes don’t usually attack a herd. She encounters nothing except her own disturbances around the fence from shoring up its rails. Grassy depressions from her boots’ curved heels, half-circles from Little Bee’s hooves.

And Millie’s.

She could’ve repaired the fence without Matthew’s help. She’s done it before.

She’ll do it again, after he leaves. After she sends him away and she’s safe again.

As safe as she can be, in her position.

And if it was easier yesterday, with another pair of hands?

Rey snorts, kicking at tufted grasses until her boot strikes bare dirt. Nothing is worth her dependence. She’d been a child when she’d last needed help from anyone. She’s a grown woman now. She’s self-sufficient. She can do what needs doing, and more.

She just has to get the man off her ranch.

Then she’ll be fine. Fine to look after her five remaining cows with calves stretching their ribs and wombs, fine to cut timber for her shanty and build out its roof and walls into a shingled, chink-walled cabin. Fine to treat herself to a real venison steak from her horde in the smokehouse, instead of cold tinned beans.

Rey promises herself this every year.

Riding back up from the pastures at a leisurely lope, mist dissipating as the sun curves a bright arm over the mountains, she untacks and grooms Little Bee, then hangs her branding iron beside a row of pitchforks and shovels in her storage stall. It’s then that she notices the stall's stacked alfalfa bales are disturbed. Loose flakes spill from their twine cording. The floor’s sawdust spread is rifled too, as though something has been dragged through it. Frowning, Rey squats down and follows an ineptly covered trail across the stall’s length, tracing its grooves with her fingertips and advancing to the far wall…

A wordless shout erupts from her shanty.

She’s on her feet in an instant, head whipping around toward the stable door so hard that her hat skids on the messily bunned hair beneath it. And she smells smoke.

 _No, no, no_ —

Rey vaults up her porch steps and bursts into the room, not even bothering to pause with a palm splayed against the door to test for an incriminating swell of heat on its boards. Her fists are doubled, her feet braced.

But what she finds makes her cock her head.

Matthew’s managed to free both his wrists again. That’s vexing, but not surprising. He’s standing beside the pot-bellied stove and flapping at plumes of rising smoke, coughing, eyes an angry red and tears dripping over his cheekbones.

Which _is_ surprising.

And the only thing that seems to be on fire is a quivering medley of tinned beans burbling and belching from within a cherry-glowing frying pan on the stovetop.

_Oh, sweet lord..._

Rey does the only sensible thing she can think of in the face of such ridiculousness—she shoves Matthew out of the way to grab the frying pan’s handle with a protective dishrag wrapped around her palms, then rushes its smoking weight outside before the beans explode. She hurls the pan off the porch. Legumes combust as they erupt from their skins in a disgusting, blackened mass. Rey coughs at the revolting odor she’s drawn deep into her nose and lungs. Leaving the pan where it falls in the grass, she strides back into the smoky shanty, grabs Matthew’s right arm in one hand while raking back the stove’s glittering coals with a poker in the other, and hauls him outside after her. He doesn’t resist, gasping for breath as they stagger into the clean morning, doubled over with a hand clutching his chest.

Inhaling great lungfuls of air, they don’t speak for a few minutes, catching their breath and soothing the hacking coughs from their throats. Only when they’re both breathing without a whistle does Matthew unclog his chest of gray spittle—a gurgling noise—and hobble over to a porch post. He snags an arm around it, finally taking the full crush of his weight off Rey’s shoulders. She rubs her aching arms and wipes her smoke-filmed eyes. Below them on the ground, beans continue to pop their skins with little explosions of steam. As the legumes soak down into the dirt and disintegrate, the frying pan’s bottom is exposed—half-burned away, the cast iron pox-marked with holes from the stove’s scorching heat.

 _Well_.

Out of all the mess and waste, one irrelevant fact niggles at Rey’s brain. When she gargles her throat clear and speaks, she doesn’t swear, or ask Matthew what the hell he was doing, but:

“How’d you open the bean tins?”

“What?” Frowning, he scrubs a hand over his black-bristled jaw. 

“The tins. I took the knives,” Rey jerks a thumb at their sheaths hanging from her belt, “so how did you open the tins?”

Matthew evaluates her question while he wipes his mouth. Then he says, “My teeth.”

“Your _teeth_?”

He bares them—strong, square, and white beneath lips rouged with heat.

“You can’t bite through tin,” she says, but she’s not completely sure. Can he?

He shrugs. “I didn’t have a knife. I was hungry.”

“I was coming back. I’d have given you something soon—”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

A fair point. Rey doesn’t like it.

“I told you to stay where I put you.” She rounds on him to force him onto the defensive.

“Has that been working?” Those strong teeth snap.

Oh. _Oh_...he’s been using his teeth to get loose, hasn’t he? After the tin, Rey’s cloth ties must be child’s play for him. Well, she could use baling twine instead. Or cut rope from her lasso, which is sturdy enough to haul fence posts upright.

But she’d never be sure.

“No,” she answers him slowly. Admits. “No, it hasn’t been working. You get loose every time.”

“And I’ll keep getting loose.” Matthew spits out another dribble of sludge. He drags the back of his hand across his lips. Then, wincing, he straightens against his porch post and holds her gaze with gold-flecked onyx irises. “So.”

“So,” Rey echoes him, staring straight back beneath her hat’s shadow and her frown while she works through her options. If she can’t keep him secured while she’s away...she’s going to have to take him with her while she does her chores.

Not a good option, but it’s the best one she has.

 _Fine_.

She can do this.

He’s bullheaded, but she knows how to deal with bulls.

And bullshit. She’s good at that, too.

 _So_ , she repeats to herself.

“Have you done any work with welding or branding?” Rey tilts her chin at the dilapidated frying pan. “Aside from breaking things so they need those repairs?”

“I’ve shod horses before.”

“Good.” He won’t be totally useless. “The heating principle’s the same. We’ll eat, then we’ll work.”

“Doing what?” He grunts as she shoulders him away from his post and hauls him back into the shanty. A charred, acrid odor lingers in the room, but with the door propped open and a chittering wind stirring through the walls, they can breathe without hacking.

“I’ve got some two-month-old calves down in the arena. The newest ones are too young for the mark, but the older bullocks are ready. They’ll need branding before I turn out my herd after the season’s over.”

Rey rummages among her few pieces of crockery until she comes up with a dented pot. Cracking lids off bean tins, she empties their contents into it. She cautiously prods her poker into the stove, controlling its rising heat so that she doesn’t singe the beans and the bottom from this vessel, too. Then she stirs at the bubbling legumes, keeping them from burning. She sniffs and rotates the pot’s placement on the stovetop. A few minutes of scraping with her spoon, and they’re ready.

“You can rope the calves while I brand them. Or are you squeamish?” She punctuates her inquiry by dropping a lump of warmed-over bean mash onto a tin plate and pushing it over to Matthew on the table.

“Will I have to ride your mule?”

“Unless you’d rather walk.”

He digs into the beans with a spoon she offers as though they’ve done him some personal injury.

Rey takes this as grudging confirmation. Good. If her arrangement’s to succeed, the man and mule need to cooperate. Not well enough for Millie to obey Matthew over Rey, but enough not to hinder Rey’s own work.

Dishing up a legume portion for herself, she leans back against the shanty’s wall and eats out of a bowl with her fingers, pads stinging from the heat; Matthew’s using her only spoon. He eats like he’s starving, finishing much more quickly than she.

Then he holds out the utensil.

Rey refuses it with a disgusted snort, sucking brown juices from her fingers instead, holding his gaze. Forcing him to witness her independence from anything he has to offer. Even her own tools.

She’s allowing him to come along with her while she works because it’s her only decent option, but she doesn’t need anything from him. He has to know this. She narrows her eyes, daring him to look away from the knowledge she’s forcing upon him.

Matthew’s tongue flicks out over his lower lip and catches a single bead of moisture there. Slowly, he lowers the spoon. He doesn’t glance aside.

And Rey finds that she can’t swallow. Did some of the beans get tinned without a full cooking? Gulping around a constriction in her throat, she raises the bowl to her mouth and slurps the remainder of her meal. “Are you finished?” she challenges him, thunking her emptied bowl down on the table as though he’s the one who’s made her wait.

“Yes.”

“Well, good.” She marches them both to the stable at a brisk pace. She tacks up their mounts and spurs Little Bee down to the cattle pasture before Millie has finished unfolding her forelegs and haunches from the barn floor, Matthew muttering through white-pressed lips and gripping the saddlehorn.

By the time Matthew and Millie join her, Rey’s built up a small but fiercely hot fire next to the fence, thrust in the business end of her branding iron to heat at the coals’ spitting blue center, and cut out her calves old enough for branding into a smaller enclosure within the arena’s fence.

“She doesn’t like me,” Matthew grouses as the mule’s head swings around when he neck-reins her closer to Rey and Little Bee, away from a patch of clover she’s been steadily mowing down. Millie blows her agreement, pink-flecked lips drawn back over her yellowing teeth. “She kept trying to bite me when you weren’t there to see.”

Rey raises her eyebrows. “Have you given her any reason to not hate you?”

“Nice mule,” he returns sarcastically, and pats Millie’s neck.

Millie bites his foot.

“The _hell_ —”

Rey snorts. “Mules know sarcasm. Don’t try to make nice with her unless you mean it.”

Matthew curses, flexing his bitten toes.

Millie’s actually been quite tolerant, in Rey's mind. She’s bitten the man’s right foot, rather than his left. From a mule, that’s considerate. Something to ponder.

But for now—

Rey tosses her spare lasso over onto Matthew’s saddlehorn. “Rope one of the calves. Then get ready to hand me the branding iron. The rod’s long enough that you should be able to grab it without dismounting.”

She hops into the enclosure with her calves, singing a wordless, nasal song to soothe them. Their ears flop and their heavy lids are soft over milky bovine eyes while Rey approaches. She walks unhurriedly, touching them and patting like she always does. There’s no reason to make them afraid. It’s kindness, and her work's easier if they're calm.

From the corner of an eye, she sees Matthew begin to spin his lasso with a practiced wrist, low and slowly at first, then higher and faster, taking aim at a calf with two white stockings on his rear legs. The rope whirls with a high, sweet sound, not so different from Rey’s singing to the herd, and then— _snap!_ The cord whips through the air, skids over the calf’s head, and pulls tight before the animal can even bawl out his surprise. Reacting on instinct, the little bullock leaps away, yanking the rope taut so that it holds him in a sidling, bucking arc. Rey tackles the calf, bowling her shoulder against his so that he goes down on his right side. In no more than five seconds, she’s hogtied all four cloven hooves together with her own lasso’s tail.

“Brand,” she calls, a knee braced into the calf’s kidneys to hold him still. Matthew leans across the fence to hand her the iron rod’s cool end. Its brand glows red-hot.

Grimacing, Rey raises the mark over her animal’s haunches. She hates this.

A sizzle of hair—the calf bellowing and struggling while she forces herself to count all the way up to three in her head—and Rey jerks her iron off the bullock’s flank. A sloping _R_ now marks the calf as belonging to her ranch.

“You’re all right, little one, you’re all right.” She releases the youngling from her hogtie and her knee. Squalling, he bolts up and runs to a length of fencing that adjoins the herd’s enclosure. Matthew plays the lasso’s tail through his fingers until the circle around the calf’s neck slackens enough for him to flick the noose free.

Nodding her thanks, Rey wipes beading sweat off her cheeks. Branding’s a brutal process, but it’s the only way to keep this calf secure from rustlers. And she’s good at her work. She hurts the calves no more than she has to.

She only marks them to keep them safe.

Nostrils full of the harsh stench of burning hair, she hands her branding iron back to Matthew.

“Heat it again.” A cooling iron extends the time it takes for a brand to set, prolonging a calf’s pain while the mark prints onto its hide. But waiting for the metal to heat when one calf has already gone through the ordeal is almost worse; the others are skittish and afraid.

Rey loves them and protects them, and she doesn’t want her calves to fear her. But there’s no other way to make them safe. To make them hers. So she sings her wild, wailing song to calm the bullocks as best she can while the iron heats again to red-hot. She strokes fuzzy growths on the calves’ heads where their horns will grow one day. She speaks softly into their long, hairy ears.

Then Matthew snares the next bullock. Rey tackles it and ties it down with a few swift twists from her rope. She brands it and releases it, quickly as she can.

The process repeats again. And again, until her eight two-month-olds are all marked with Rey’s _R_.

Each flank bearing a shiny seared circle with her letter etched through it, the animals run against the branding enclosure’s fenceline, bawling in complaint and for their mothers’ comfort. They’ll be able to roam with the herd now when she opens the gates, rather than staying behind in the arena while the older cattle graze their pastures.

Panting, hair on her temples falling down from under her hat and tangling with her eyelashes, Rey lowers a fence rail into the larger enclosure. The calves leap past her over the bottom planks, bucking and crying.

They’ll be all right.

She raises the branding pen’s fence again. Climbing out of the enclosure with her thighs trembling from the exertion of holding seventy-five-pound animals on the ground, Rey drops heavily down into the pasture grass. She scuffs dirt over her spitting fire, dousing its heat. Her chirp to Little Bee is almost soundless on her dry tongue, but the mustang trots over to her just the same. He kneels without a command when her legs are too weak to swing her into the saddle.

“How’d you do this on your own?” Matthew asks. He points back to the brands on Rey’s mature cattle as they retreat up toward the barn and shanty, drinking from canteens slung over their saddlehorns beside the lassos. “It’s a chore for two men, at least.”

“Or women.” Rey frowns over her canteen’s lip.

“Or women. But you’re on your own. How’d you do it?”

The truth?

With frustrated tears and bruises kicked on every inch of her body. With burns on her forearms and thighs from her grip slipping on the branding iron. With wounds on her cattle’s haunches that took weeks to heal, before she’d learned how long to leave the brand against their flanks. With other cows stolen by rustlers when she hadn’t pressed the iron hard enough, her mark fading with the animals’ next coat of hair growing in.

With failure. By failing until at last, she succeeded.

“I did what I could. Sometimes, it was enough,” is what Rey tells him.

He doesn’t reply. What would he say, anyhow? They ride up to the barn and dismount in silence, except for Millie’s protest when Matthew topples awkwardly off her, bound by gravity and an inevitable appointment with the stable floor.

“Ugh,” he grunts.

Rey looks on with an unflattering lack of interest while he hauls himself upright on the branding iron’s rod, the pole cooled to plain, dull metal once more. Let him see how hard it is to do this work alone, before he insinuates things about how she’s managed. As if he thinks she can’t do ordinary ranching chores, when he’s the one with a shot and broken leg!

From where her slug punched through him.

Scowling at this reminder, Rey stalks off to the shanty. Matthew hobbles in her wake. He nearly collides with her when she abruptly draws up before her porch steps, staring down at the frying pan and legume-stained grass.

Those beans…

“How many tins did you waste?” She points to the mess, where enterprising ants have swarmed in a busy operation to steal away the bounty. Then she jabs her pointing finger at Matthew’s chest.

“Four.”

“ _Four?_ ” Four tins could’ve fed her for a week—have fed her for longer. “You were going to eat _four tins’ worth_?”

“No.” Pushing past her accusatory finger, Matthew grunts and takes the first porch step. “You’ve hardly eaten anything but that…”—a groan, as his bare toes jar against the next riser—“indigestible...ah, wolf steak since I’ve met you.” Towering above her where she’s standing in the dirt, he turns over his shoulder and says,

“I was hungry, and I figured you were hungry, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.
> 
> (In other news, my Mad Max-ish post-apocalyptic AU, [Sun, Sand, and Stone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14159823?view_full_work=true) just finished up. I'm so happy to leave our darlings in a good place, but I am...emotional that the fic is finished. Onwards with this rodeo!)


	5. Chapter 5

Rey’s gone when he wakes the next morning.

Ren groans, winking sand-stuck eyes, his shoulders cramped from their extension over his head in the night. For all her trusting him to wield rope and sharp iron during the branding process, Rey had still bound his wrists to the bedposts before she rocked to sleep in her chair. His mouth is gritty and tastes like something’s died under his tongue—a lingering relish of the whiskey he’d gulped down when his leg throbbed too badly for him to rest after his antics on the mule. Gagging slightly, he runs a hand over his lips, scratching his palm with the prickly growth of stubble rising over his cheeks and chin. God, he needs a shave.

That’s when Ren realizes—his wrists are free.

And he’s alone in the shanty.

Acting on pure, vital instinct, he sits up to swing both legs off the mattress, to rush for the unlocked door—and draws up short, breathing hard through his nose, his broken leg singing with little shocks of pain along every nerve from his ankle to his shoulder.

Rey’s splint is sturdy, but he can’t walk unaided. The rifle slug’s clean passage through his thigh pulses with a dull, heavy ache beneath its sticking plaster. There’s nothing he can use as a crutch in this spartan room. She probably knows this. He was a fool yesterday to reveal the extent of his range of motion down at the calving enclosure. But it'd felt so good to move after being strapped to the bed for…

Has it really only been three days?

The time seems like an eternity.

In the length of Kylo Ren’s life, three days are nothing but a snap of fingers when compared with the years he’s ground through. And it could be the immediacy of his pain, but right here in this moment, these three days eclipse all the rest.

Which means nothing. Because this isn’t his life.

Pretending at virtuous ranching when he’s made himself into the kind of man against whom cattlemen and homesteaders brand their herds—not that there aren’t ways around a brand, of course. Riding a mule like a simpleton in some comic farce. Playing helpmeet to a slip of a woman with tip-tilted, wary hazel eyes and a sweet, chapped mouth that would make a saint cry...when she’s not scowling or swearing.

Sometimes both. At Ren.

Rey suspects him. She must. She’s not an idiot. She’ll know he’s guilty of something; everyone out here’s guilty if they’ve survived long enough to tell their story. And since he’s not crying foul or threatening her with the law for his bedstead imprisonment…

Yes, Rey suspects him, even if she doesn’t know on what grounds.

Her tongue has slipped a few times. Hints as to why she hasn’t lashed his wrists to a stirrup and dragged him down to Sweet Springs. But these accidental innuendos aren’t enough for him to understand her and why she’s choosing to act as she does. He only knows that she distrusts the townsmen as much as Ren. Probably for different reasons, of course.

Probably.

But for now, she’s left him untied.

It won’t have been an accident.

Bracing his palms against the rustling mattress, Ren eases himself to his feet in fits and starts, leaning drunkenly to take most of his weight on his good right side. Gripping the back of Rey’s rocking chair and shuffling his broken leg along the shanty’s uneven floorboards enables him to wince and wobble his way to the door. He hesitates before raising its bar. Hardly breathing, he pinches his lower lip between his teeth in pain and anticipation...the door sags on its hinges. Then it swings inward, bottom scuffling against the floor like Ren’s dragging left foot. Unlocked, unbarricaded. Morning blooms over the threshold.

Huh.

An awkward hop takes him beneath the lintel and over to one of the porch’s posts. Fastening an arm around it, he shields his eyes and squints down through a glare of sunbeams refracting off dissipating mist in the pasturelands. From his position, Ren can see the stable, a narrow smokehouse, a spit of a garden plot with rampant pepper and melon vines, the lime-smelling, tar-papered privy, and down a gently sloping hill to Rey’s calving enclosure. Teasing breezes skitter and ripple through the blowing grasses, waking dandelion puffs into the air. A familiar eerie song drifts up to him where he stands. A tiny figure in a broad-brimmed hat and trousers rides a tobiano horse, circling around the arena while posting to the horse’s jog-trot.

Even at this distance, the figure’s unmistakably Rey.

She’s gone down to the pastures without him. She’s left him untied. Purposefully untied him, then left him alone in the shanty.

Why?

His left leg has begun to pulse and throb from standing upright even for this long. Ren gingerly lowers himself onto the porch’s edge, splint stretched clumsily before him and his bare heel braced on one of the steps. Sitting in the sunshine, leaning back against a post with winds whisking through the stubble on his cheeks, he waits for her to come back and explain herself.

His wait isn’t completely repellent.

But this... _leisure_ , is that the word?...feels odd. Resting on a porch in the day’s first sunlight, watching grasses grow, listening to cattle lowing from their pastures and the distant screech of a hunting hawk piercing the iron-blue sky...Yes, it’s odd. But good, too? He’s not sure yet. Ren decides against moving, permitting this moment and these sensations to last. Besides, he doesn’t trust himself to attempt anything useful in the shanty. Nothing like heating up beans for their morning meal. Yet Rey hadn’t seemed particularly displeased that he’d tried, yesterday—only vexed that he’d scorched the bottom from her frying pan.

Which is fair.

So he sits still and closes his eyes with his face tilted into the light. He’ll likely burn the lower half of his jaw, so much paler than his cheeks and forehead from covering his nose and mouth with a black bandana for weeks at a time. But the sun’s gentle warmth feels good—yes, _good_ —and he doesn’t edge back into the shanty’s shadows.

Perhaps he’s half-asleep when a hand touches his arm.

Ren's gut reaction flares so hot and sudden that he doesn't even raised his half-masted eyelids before he moves. He seizes the wrist attached to that hand and _twists_ , breaking the contact and breaking loose a cry of protest, too.

“ _Matthew!_ ”

His eyes snap open just in time to see the flat of Rey’s free hand swing down across his, jarring the bones and releasing his grip. A sharp jolt of pain ricochets all the way up through his elbow and shoulder. Glaring at him, Rey massages her fingers.

“Why did you do that?”

Tendons throbbing from her strike, Ren squints up at her figure outlined against a shaft of sunlight falling down from the eastern hills, piercing the grasslands' last misty coils. His eyes water with the brilliance. Not from pain in his hand. But he won’t let her think that she’s made him wince and tear, so he snaps back,

“Why did you touch me?”

“I was calling your name!”

Not his real name. So he hadn’t waked from the shimmering edges of sleep, instantly alert. But he can’t tell her this. “I didn’t hear you.”

"Hmm." Rey hums low in her throat, an appraising sound. Then, giving her fingers a brisk shake, she holds out her hand. Her abrupt courtesy’s a little sarcastic as she says, “Do you need help getting up?”

And damn if that doesn’t make him laugh. She’s just so _piqued_. Why that’s funny, Ren can’t say. But the tiny annoyed wrinkles forming over her nose make him want to keep laughing.

Rey raises her extended hand in warning, eyebrows crooking together with a threat to slap him across the face if he doesn’t pull himself together.

He raises his own eyebrows back at her, then abruptly grabs her hand and hauls himself up with her stance as leverage. His sudden weight on her arm jolts her off her balance in the grass. She stumbles forward into the porch with her belly and hips. Her breath huffs out in surprise.

“Thank you,” he says.

Rey scrowls. Rubbing at her hipbone, she stamps up the stairs and into the shanty, leaving Ren to hop or stumble along after her. She slams her bean pot onto the stove and empties two tins into it for heating, shoulders braced and lips vibrating with angry mutters. Then she shoves past him to the washbasin standing beneath her spare clothes. Lathering her arms and face, she scrubs viciously at her skin, sputtering when her mumbles cause her to inhale soap dripping over her chin.

“Don’t let the beans burn,” she snips through a ragged towel, attacking her jaw and ears as though they belong to someone she doesn’t like.

Is there any reason for him to refuse? Not if he wants answers from Rey. _Waking untied. Hand on his arm in the sunlight_. And unburned beans. So Ren limps to the stove and stirs at their warmed-over meal with a wooden spoon. While he paddles the spoon’s bowl through simmering, burbling legumes, he says,

“You untied me this morning.”

There’s a crackling sound behind him; the noise of a comb dragged through snarled hair. It makes his teeth clench and gooseflesh rise on his nape.

“Yes.” Another crackle from her comb. A grunt.

“Why?”

“Pay attention—you’re charring the beans.” _Damn_ , she moves fast! Rey’s fingers close over the spoon and tug its handle out of his grip before he’s even aware that she’s left her battle with the comb over her washbasin. She jerks her head toward the mattress. “Sit.”

Ren claws his way over to the bed and sinks down onto its straw-tick while Rey makes a vengeful stir through the belching legumes. Beans splatter up the pot’s sides. He watches her swill their meal into submission, a scowl denting her lips. The curves of her ears are a brilliant pink with scrubbing, as is the back of her neck showing through her hair—down from its tuck under her hat or its slipshod bun. And now Ren knows the reason for her grunts with the comb, and why she always seems to keep her hair up: it’s horrifically, impossibly snarled. Honey-varnished strands from the crown of her head to her ears are stretched tight and smooth with combing, but the rest is a tangled mare’s nest around her neck and shoulders.

He doesn’t say anything at the matted sight. Any words would smack of disdain, or worse—pity.

Perhaps sensing his curiosity, Rey scratches a nail beneath her knots. Then she abruptly stills, as though he’s caught her doing something shameful. Her shoulders hunch. Trying to hide the damage?

It’s as much interest as shared embarrassment that makes Ren repeat his question: “Why did you untie me?”

Rey dollops beans into a bowl and onto a tin plate, the corners of her mouth tucked and pulling unhappy dimples into her cheeks. “Because muscle weakens when it’s not used, and stiffens when it’s held in one position for too long. I need you to be functional. So,” she tilts her head.

“You untied me because you’re putting me to work again.”

“Unless you’d rather stay tied down on the mattress. Besides, you didn’t protest yesterday.”

“I’m not protesting.” He accepts the spoon that Rey slams down beside his plate. “I’m just surprised. I’m not sure I’ll be much good with my leg, unless there’s something I can do mounted.”

Rey sears him with a withering look, beans bulging in her cheeks. She swallows thickly. “I’ll be gentle with you.”

Just like that, with a spoon of legume mush lifted halfway to his mouth and Rey already digging into her next bite, Ren’s brain simply whites out. He tries to wash down his current mouthful with long draughts from a canteen on the table. He can’t. To curb his spinning head _—_ _no, she wouldn’t, it’s not innuendo, not from her _—__ and an unbidden pressure at his trousers' crotch, he grits out, “What made you decide to trust me?”

“I don’t.” Cheeks hollowing with suction, Rey licks her fingers. “But you’ll be where I can keep an eye on you. And you can make yourself useful, since I’m feeding you.”

“I didn’t ask for your charity.” That’s a safe response, isn’t it? Hammering the point home—to himself and her—Ren directs a pointed glance toward the plastered bullet hole in his left thigh, leaning into the lie of Rey’s culpability.

“It’s not charity if you have to pay back in kind. Besides, you can’t leave the ranch without a cooperative mount. You already know Millie won’t take you.” A bald truth, a flat tone. But then...then she hesitates, eyebrows pinching together. “And for whatever reason, you tried to make a meal yesterday. For both of us.” She swipes her fingers around the bottom of her bowl, not looking at him. “You might’ve wrecked the frying pan, but I...I wouldn’t want you to think I’m not grateful.”

Ren doesn’t want her gratitude. Heating up tinned beans? She doesn’t have a damn thing to be grateful for.

He doesn’t tell her this, because he’s just wary enough not to. Probably not as wary of her as he should be now, this woman who keeps him captive from his crew and binds him to her bed.

Who unbinds him.

“It’s nothing,” Ren says at last, because she seems to be waiting for him to speak, the silence between them stretching out thick and a little sticky. _Taffee_ , his brain supplies. All sugary innocence until he’s mired in it and it drowns him, or tears out his teeth and nails when he tries to fight free, to breathe. His tongue feels too large in his mouth.

“It’s _not_ nothing.” Rey’s shaking her head, fingers itching along her neck again, touching the snarls beneath her ears. But then she startles and drops her hand. Her eyes snap up. Any hesitancy, any softness has burned away. “I need to check my traplines. Can you skin pelts?”

That’s how Ren finds himself skinning coveys and ground squirrels later in the afternoon, Rey on the porch’s far side and working with a hatchet and knife much bigger than the ones she’s given him to use. A concentrated frown wrinkling her nose—snatching Ren’s focus from the squirrel pelt that he’s scraping clean of connective tissue so that he almost slices off his thumb—she’s hacking away at a gnarled piece of timber hauled up from the river behind her ranch. She splits the wood down its center with a single stroke from her hatchet, as though the double-headed blade is an extension of her arm. Then she shaves gentle slopes on either side of the long, narrow blocks. Each of the pieces’ top ends gradually forms into a _t_ with a concave curve. Rey cuts the opposite ends to a thickness of three fingers and chops flat bottoms to them. Appraising her work, she runs her fingers along the rough shapes. Her mouth folds when a splinter sinks beneath her nail.

Ren averts his eyes before she catches him watching her. He’s skinning a last rabbit with single-minded ardor when he feels her gaze swivel up.

“Finished?” she inquires in such a pointed tone that he has to wonder whether she’s not acutely aware of what he’s doing.

“Are there more?”

“There will be. It’s a good year.” Rey comes to stand beside him where he sits on the porch’s edge. She thunks her wooden lengths down at his side, almost as if she’s measuring them against his body. “Or at least, it was. Wolves shouldn’t be coming down into the valley. Not in a season like this.” Her eloquent chin gestures toward the buffalo wolf pelt curing on her shanty’s exterior wall.

Ren makes a noncommittal noise in his throat and rasps a quivering blob of fat from his covey’s hide. What does she expect him to say? He can’t agree with her. Can’t reveal his familiarity with the valley. With the land’s cycles around Sweet Springs.

Fortunately, Rey doesn’t seem to be tracking his thoughts along these lines. Instead she says, “You were coming from the same direction as the buffalo wolves, Matthew. Over the eastern ridge. Did you see anything that might make them change their behavior? I was planning to take Little Bee out to have a look around, though now…”

She can’t, for obvious reasons. Reasons like him.

But Ren already knows why wolves are fleeing west from the plains and taking new hunting grounds. New prey.

“There’s a railroad line coming.”

“I know. I’ve heard about tracks being laid further north in the valley, nearer to the town. Though why—”

Ren interrupts her. “Men from the line are slaughtering bison on the plains when trains come through. They're using up the groundwater. Those wolves are probably starving. So they’re coming here.”

 _Wells and streams contaminated with toxic metal runoff and putrefying corpses, dirt disintegrating and blowing away in the wind as forests are uprooted, cut timber burned to fuel traveling forges that hammer extracted ore into railroad ties, explosions sounding through the night to mine more minerals from the soil, always more_ —

“They have rifles, or they throw explosives into the herds from passing trains. Just leaving the corpses to rot. I had to ride through...” His stomach churns, recalling the stench. The scent of exploded earth and flesh torn apart by a blast. His lungs clutch. Rotten memories have him breathing hard enough to send pain spitting down from his chest and through his leg. He chokes to a stop.

Rey's quiet while he gasps and struggles against the past's riptide, his throat rasping while he gags on nothing. The faint wind mutters a commentary through her stunned, disbelieving silence. She tilts her head into it, listening. An echo, and a confirmation. _This is truth_. Then she releases a slow breath and squats down on her heels. “But why? There’s no reason to do something so wasteful. It’s pointless, and dangerous. And so unnecessary!”

“The packs are traveling west. Coming here, driven off like everything and everyone else,” he repeats, forcing himself to speak normally, to swallow back the bile on his tongue, “because there’s nothing for them to hunt anymore. Nothing for anyone to hunt for probably hundreds of miles. Nothing but blowing dirt and iron spikes. The water's gone, or too foul to drink when the railroad's through with it. There's no way to cross the plains. And the line’s going to cut through this valley, too. It’ll destroy your pastures with dirty groundwater and dust storms when they blast through hills to make a flat track or mine ore—those explosions going all night, and you can't escape them because they're all around you, following no matter how hard you ride, they're inside your head—”

“They can’t do that!”

“ _They?_ ” Ren spits at the acid coating his cheeks’ inner lining. “ _They_ can do what they want, Rey. Buying off the mayor and anyone who might stop them—”

“But it’s wrong—”

“I know!” he bellows, and she flinches. “Sorry, I’m sorry, but—”

Rey backs away, hatchet gripped so tightly that her knuckles are white ridges through tanned, gold-freckled skin. Her voice cracks when she says, “T-the wolves will just keep coming. They have to, if it’s true.”

“So, shoot them. I know you can. They’re the least of your problems—”

“I don’t want to!” she cries, axe swinging dangerously. “I don’t want to have to keep killing and killing and killing, just to keep what’s mine! _I don’t want to!_ ”

“You’re not going to have a choice!”

The hatchet's blade freezes mid-arc. Rey's fingers make a brutal clench on its handle; wood creaks. Her tawny eyes darken to steel in the porch's shadows. Her lips firm. And then she says, all crackling panic excised from her voice, all the childish pitchy quavering scraped away, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“This isn’t something you can fight, not if the town's behind it. If the mayor's—” he stumbles again— _I tried, I tried to make her understand, and she wouldn’t listen to me_. He's Cassandra howling warnings on deaf ears. Except he knows Rey’s hearing him fine; she just doesn’t care.

“That’s what I’ve been told all my life,” she sneers. Mimicking other voices with a twisted mouth, she parrots, “ _You’re too little. You’re a girl. You’re too young. You’re just a woman._ Well, do you know what, Matthew? I’m also _too damn stubborn._ ”

Ren’s instinctively ready to refute this...when he realizes that everything he’s seen Rey do validates her self-assessment. _Every. Damn. Thing_. His rebuttal hasn’t got a leg to stand on.

The appropriateness of the phrase doesn’t escape him.

Grudgingly, he nods.

But.

If Rey’s planning to do something stubborn about the railroad—leave her ranch to confront its overseers with righteous and distracted fury—storm down to the line where supply wagons stand—occupying the guards’ attention so they leave their posts—

“I could help you,” he says.

“No.”

“You haven’t even thought about it.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Then why are you letting me help with this?” He brandishes a skinned covey pelt at her. If he can get her to take him down to the railroad line, get her distracted and distracting everyone else—

Rey flicks a speck of blood off her cheek without batting an eyelash. “I’m not going to beat a dead horse with you, Matthew. My ranch, my home, my choice. It’s this or a tie-down on the bed.”

“Which didn’t work,” he reminds her with another shake to the pelt.

“So I’ve made the other choice.”

 _Black or white. Yes or no_. The lines of her decisions must be so brutally, painfully, perfectly clear. _Stop the train._ No other alternative in her logic.

“You start planing shingles tomorrow.”

So tomorrow, Ren does. After she’s warmed over another tin of beans and checked on her herd, Rey hauls him to the barn. Braced off his bad leg on the stable’s threshold, he watches warily while she shoulders her way into the storage stall...but she returns without pawing through the loosened alfalfa bales in its furthest corner. She carries an awkward sawhorse tucked under her arm.

“Sit.” She points to a row of feed barrels.

With his long legs, a cask serves well enough for a seat.

Grunting, Rey wrangles the sawhorse into position between Ren’s knees, its head butting against his stomach. While she adjusts the tool so that he can lean forward without jamming the sawhorse’s poll under his ribs, her hands come to work perilously close to his groin. And just like that, in the midst of all the leaden concerns and desperate possibilities huddled in his chest, his breath stutters— _the light, clean smell of her sweat_. Ren's cock gives an interested, willful pulse against his thigh. He tries to exhale slowly, thin and shallow through his nose. _No._ But Rey doesn’t seem to notice anything unusual in her behavior or his— _thank Christ_ —and merely steps back after a minute to evaluate her sawhorse’s positioning. Her hands fist on her narrow hips. There’s no hint of coyness or embarrassment in her gaze as it goes straight between his thighs where the sawhorse rests; this is just work.

Ren’s grateful that her barn’s shadows dim the harsh color burnishing his cheekbones. But there’s nothing he can do about his trembling mouth or hands.

Does she have any idea what such a look from a woman does to a man? To _him_?

No. _No_ , he thinks, _she really doesn’t know_.

Skittish, prickly, independent, feral Rey, twisting limbs and an arching throat—

If she's looking to divert him from thoughts of the railroad, she's succeeded. _Too damn well._

“Have you planed shingles before?” Her voice seems to crack over Ren like a retaliatory slap, though it’s only her plain, everyday, no-nonsense tone.

He clears his throat and his mind as best he can, counts his fears and half-formed plots. “No.”

“Well, have you ever used a hatchet?”

He settles into himself with a scornful look. _Of course_.

Better. This is better.

“Good. You’ll be less likely to lose a finger.” Rey swings the axe from her belt, casually hefting its lethal weight. She circles behind his barrel. Ren has no more than a breath to crane his neck around before her forearms settle over his shoulders, hatchet in one hand, a rectangular block of wood snagged from the storage stall in the other. She settles this block onto the sawhorse’s spine, leaning forward with extended arms so that her weight presses into his back.

Again, he has to breathe and close his eyes at this unexpected contact. _Her warmth, her delicate odor_. But he snaps them open immediately, because—

Rey’s still not wearing a corset or a breastband.

“Notch your axehead into the block’s upper edge. Then draw the hatchet toward yourself along the sawhorse, making the angle shallower as you near your chest,” she says while he fights to swallow around a dry tongue, desperately trying not to inhale. Not to draw her perspiring, maddening perfume into his lungs, deep within his body. Blissfully or vindictively unaware of his torment, Rey demonstrates how to ease her blade into the wood and curve it through the block. She splits the piece apart and produces two perfect shingles. She continues, “You’ll feel when it’s right. The axehead should slide easily through the wood’s grain.” Her hands linger to show him the finished product, fingers curled too close between his thighs. Far, far too close to the hot, urgent ache in his groin. “You see?”

No, this isn't better. This is a thousand times worse.

“Are you looking?”

“Y-yes,” he stutters. “Give me the hatchet.” Anything to move away her hands, to have her stand clear of his back where her breasts’ soft curves meet the muscles in his shoulders.

“Are you sure?” He hears her frown, evaluating his unsteady fingers.

“Yes, damn it!”

 _Thank Christ_ , she stands back. He’s not even feeling blasphemous while he prays his thanks.

Fortunately, Ren’s quite good with his hands when Rey’s not flush with her breasts and hips against him, so tantalizingly and innocently close. He finds an angle and a rhythm with the shingle blocks that she stacks beside his barrel; the hatchet yields well to his purpose. She observes him for his first few strokes, lips parted and prepared to swoop in with admonishments if he makes a single cut beyond her specifications...but eventually she seems satisfied with his work and leaves him to it.

He breathes normally for the first time in what feels like hours.

In the quiet of Rey’s absence, the mule chuffs into her feed as though she’s laughing.

“Don’t you dare,” Ren warns her, raising his hatchet.

Millie spits her disdain.

All too soon, Rey returns with her brisk strides and bright eyes. Her small, capable hands. She’s carrying a whittling knife. The same narrow strips of wood she’d begun to shape yesterday on the porch are tucked through her elbow. She hops onto a feed barrel behind Ren with a fragrant rattle, settling and crossing her legs.

“Mind your fingers,” she says.

He manages not to amputate his thumb.

Having her working behind him is a misery—chiseling at the wood with little nips from her blade, then rasping sandpaper over the pieces with a dry, gritty sough. _Nervous_ isn’t an sensation that Kylo Ren suffers. But Matthew gets nervous around pretty, dangerous women.

Useless Matthew, with his broken leg and unruly thoughts.

But at least if he can’t see her, Rey’s also in no position to notice the shudder in Ren’s hands or the strain his trousers are taking at the crotch.

Instead of shrieking obscenities for his perversity, she hums low in her throat, crooning to herself or to her drowsing livestock while she works. The nasal, off-key noise muffles groans that Ren can't quite swallow back into his chest at dual aches in his leg and groin. When they pause for a wolf steak at midday, he chooses to haul himself along to the shanty on Rey's branding iron, rather than risk her coming so close to him again. That tantalizing shiver of her scent in the air...After eating and another agonizing hobble back to the stable, they get on with their chores until shadows stretch long from the barn. The sun teases its descending rim against the valley’s western ridgeline.

“That’s enough,” Rey says, then. “Enough for today.”

Fine. Ren’s exhausted from doing nothing but sitting on his ass and pulling the axehead toward himself over and over again, shingles piling up at his feet. Doing nothing but this repetitive motion—only this, steady as clockwork—has taken his full concentration. His skull aches and his eyes have blurred red with single-minded focus. Now, shoving the sawhorse from between his thighs before Rey can dart in to take it, he reaches for the cattle brand he’s left within reach against the mule’s stall door. He has to move, get away from her, find a private place to relieve the pulsing urgency in his groin—

“Matthew.”

“ _What?_ ” he snaps in desperation. He’s at his wits’ end, tired hands shaking on the brand’s pole as he forces himself up from his barrel.

Rey doesn’t bother answering his sharp retort. Instead, she comes to his left side and touches his wrist. He flinches. She ignores him and raises his arm off the branding iron, as though she’s going to take his weight on her shoulders again and haul him back to the shanty. But instead of her shoulder, a smooth wooden curve slots under his armpit. Almost instinctively, Ren rests his weight onto it in pure animal relief. It holds solid in a straight, unyielding line from his underarm, along his aching leg, and down to his ankle. While he stares at this implement, nonplussed and blessedly distracted from his straining cock for a moment, Rey inserts a second rod beneath his unresisting right arm.

 _Crutches_.

Rey’s made him a pair of crutches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ack--folks, I'm pretty behind on responding to comments--but know that I read and treasure each one! I should be answering my inbox this week. <3
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	6. Chapter 6

“Hold it steady—”

A grunt. Narrow wooden rungs vibrate beneath Rey’s boots. “The ground’s not flat—”

“That’s why I’m asking you to hold the ladder!”

Clinging to the edge of her shanty’s roof, Rey fights for balance with a heavy satchel of shingles slung over one shoulder. A hammer, awl, and a pouch of stout pegs weigh down her belt. Splinters dot her palms from her grip on the roofline. The ladder sways treacherously under her.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to... _ugh_...brace it. Hold still.”

“I _am_ holding still!” she barks. “You’re the one who’s moving the ladder around.”

“I know. Just...wait a minute…”

Rey’s frustrated shout becomes a shrill, pitchy squeal when the ladder rungs drop several inches out from under her. Reverberations rattle through her heels and all the way up her spine. She clings to the roof’s edge so hard that her fingers cramp—but then the ladder stabilizes with an earthy _thunk_.

“There,” Matthew calls, breathless and so smug she’d like to kick back and break his nose. “Better?”

Purely out of pique, ignoring all sense of self-preservation, Rey stamps hard on her rung. The ladder holds steady. An ache sings in her toes. Grudgingly, she has to admit, “Yes. What did you do?”

“Used my crutches to dig out two holes for the ladder’s feet.”

“Oh.”

It’s not a bad idea. But Matthew’s been as inconvenient as possible while executing it.

Naturally.

“You could’ve had me come down before you tried something like that.”

“You’d have refused, wouldn’t you?”

Well, she would’ve. She would’ve insisted on getting along with her work in shingling the shanty while the afternoon’s light is still good, rather than climbing down off the roof while he wastes precious minutes in digging trenches for the ladder’s legs.

This indisputably being the case, Rey elects not to respond. Rooting into her peg pouch, she selects a thumb-length cylinder, lines up a shingle with a hole she’s already bored into the roof’s pitch, and pummels her peg through the hewn piece and deep into the beam with her mallet. Despite her aggressive hammering, the ladder doesn’t give so much as an inch under her perched boots. Rey pounds through shingle after shingle, swinging with the full frustrated force of her shoulder, driving her pegs hard into the roof’s support beams. Making her shanty watertight against seasonal rains. Shutting out icy scrims of winter snow. Insulating the bare boards and tacked-on tar-paper with wooden slabs, keeping the frost and hot wind equally at bay.

It’s the kind of work she likes: using her hands, making something better for the coming year. Something that will ease her life just a little when lean times follow this fat season. It’s hopeful work. Not desperate with watching for storm clouds, teeth chattering, wind tearing at her clothes, swinging her hammer wrongly to smash her thumb…

 _No_.

She’d be enjoying this task, too, humming around pegs clenched between her teeth and pounding merrily at shingles with the mallet, vibrations thrumming through her muscles— _alive, alive_ —except for the man steadying her ladder and spotting her from below if she falls. Watching her for the first sign of failure.

Judging her.

So Rey brandishes her mallet in furious silence, teeth denting her pegs, narrowly missing her abused thumb as she pounds short wooden dowels through the shingle slabs. She finishes the roof’s left side in record time.

“Careful—” Matthew warns as she stomps down the ladder.

Dropping the last few feet onto the ground, Rey glares at him with a row of pegs between her teeth. Either she looks fierce, or ridiculous. But Matthew raises his dark eyebrows and lumbers out of her way on his crutches. She snorts, spraying spittle onto her pegs, and shoulders the ladder to drag it around to her shanty’s far side. She’s leaned its head against the roof and scrambled up the rungs again before Matthew can edge around the porch.

Rey doesn’t need him to dig out hollows for her ladder’s feet.

She doesn’t need him to hold its rungs steady for her while she climbs.

She doesn’t need his help.

She’s absolutely goddamn _fine_.

Rey drives home her pegs and her absolute fine-ness with vicious mallet strokes, barely missing her fingers so that she jerks back, grabbing the roofline for balance, boots skidding on un-shingled tar-paper—

Kicking the ladder away.

Between one stroke of Rey’s hammer and the next, the ladder bucks, rearing off the roof from her boots’ hard knock. It balances for a precarious, wobbling, hope-torn moment on narrow feet...then crashes flat just as Matthew rounds the shanty’s corner. Agile on his crutches after several days of practice, he’s still not quick enough to avoid the ladder as it falls, rails clipping his shoulder and sending him reeling off his balance, stumbling and struggling on one leg, crutches flailing out—and then inexorably mirroring the ladder by toppling into the grass.

Stillness.

And a moan.

Pegs scattering, half-fastened shingles left drunkenly misaligned, Rey slides down along the shanty’s roof. Digging her fingers into its hot tar-paper for traction, she cranes her neck, weight shifted precariously forward so that gravity sucks at her chest.

“Matthew?”

Another moan.

“Are you...” Rey edges sideways onto her knees, straining to see.

A hand rises from the verdant, swaying grasses that have engulfed both Matthew and Rey's ladder. Its knuckles are scraped from abrasive contact with falling wooden rungs. Its fingers make a very rude gesture.

“You’re too damn stubborn.” Matthew’s voice is gravelly and winded. His finger motions emphatically upward in Rey’s direction.

She can’t help a snort of laughter bubbling through her nose. “I told you that myself,” she reminds him. The laugh’s freed from her chest now, spewing over her tongue. Even clenching her teeth doesn’t stop it, so she just laughs, because she can’t not.

“You’ve got a nerve.” Matthew grunts, pushing himself up on his elbows. Rumpled, grass-stained. He’s shaking his head with dandelion fluff in his shaggy, curling hair, eyebrows locked in a fierce scowl. But the corner of his mouth twitches.

“I warned you,” Rey chokes. She clutches her stomach. Her belly hurts, muscles spasming in unfamiliar patterns from her chores’ daily grind. When did she last laugh?

Again, Matthew groans and rolls his eyes. Muttering uncomplimentary things, he gets the crutches under his weight. He rolls onto his right side and pushes himself up with the wooden supports and his good leg.

Laughter ebbing down to hiccoughs, Rey wipes her eyes to observe him. It takes Matthew a few failed attempts to stand, a few topples back into the grass, but his strength and tolerance for pain are...snuffling and blotting her nose on her cuff, Rey can’t help but be impressed.

And a little wary.

Balancing upright now, Matthew hooks the ladder with one of his crutches’ feet. “Do you want this? Or will you kick it off the roof again to spite me?”

Rey rolls her eyes in turn and tucks her chin.

“I’m not picking it up if you do.” The wooden head thunks down directly at the toes of Rey’s boots; Matthew’s aim is precise and ornery.

But since this ladder’s a fairly recent acquisition, his threat isn’t worth much. She’d erected her shanty without it, standing on feed barrels and once on Little Bee’s rump to hammer down her tar-papered roofing. It’s barely a six-foot drop from the roof’s edge to the ground. Rey’s made that hop a score of times.

She’d only twisted her ankle once.

During her recovery, she’d hewn the ladder with her ankle throbbing from every stroke of the axe, hacking bark from wooden strips that she’d then fastened into rungs.

Of course, Rey doesn’t tell Matthew any of this. Let him think he has her at a disadvantage. Perhaps he’ll get careless. Reveal something useful about himself.

She’s still very definite that _Matthew_ isn’t his name.

Whoever he is, he seems content to lean on his crutches for the moment and watch Rey at her work. Since the light’s fading and she wants to batten down another row of shingles before nightfall, she obliges him—boring peg holes through her shingles and into the roof’s beams, blowing sawdust clear from the holes, then driving pegs into the tight, circular spaces to hold Matthew’s hewn slabs in place against even the hardiest drumming rain or screaming wind. Her row finished, she turns to find him holding the ladder for her descent. A corner of her mouth tucked into a half-frown, she climbs down, hopping between rungs to show him that she’s quite capable of making do without his bracing hands.

“You’re welcome,” he says.

Rey turns up her nose at him and snorts, which he seems to misinterpret as a resurgence of her laughter. Matthew's lips split and curl into a grin.

Her sore belly lurches.

Rey grabs the ladder from him. She shoulders past Matthew and stashes her equipment in the stable, then pitches alfalfa into Little Bee and Millie’s mangers. She shovels a generous measure of grain into their feedboxes. More than she’d ordinarily give them after such an easy day.

Her hands aren’t shaking at all, and she’s not blushing. Why would she be? The failing light’s certainly too poor to see whether Matthew has dimples.

She’s not blushing.

She is, however, covered in sawdust.

Puffing at gritty layers coating her skin and itching inside her clothes, Rey stomps back to the shanty and attacks her arms with soap and a burlap cloth at the washbasin. She pointedly doesn’t turn to Matthew sitting on the bed. Watching her. Hair lifts on her nape, but only from the chilly water she’s splashing over her throat and face. She keeps at it until she’s scrubbed away color from her cheeks. Or at least provided a reasonable explanation for it.

Not that she has to explain herself. To him, or anyone.

Rey’s not used to having to think about other people while she gets on with her life and her work. But Matthew’s very obviously here in her shanty. She can’t lose her pointed awareness of him, even with her back turned.

Well, of course she’s more aware of him when she can’t see him.

_Danger. Threat._

Rolling down her sleeves and dusting them off with perfunctory nonchalance, Rey swivels from the washbasin to fry up two wolf steaks on the stove.

But with her aggressive splashing and scrubbing, she’s missed the noises of Matthew standing from the straw-tick and taking up her butcher knife. She jolts to a halt mid-stride, every nerve in her body shrieking with sudden, paralyzing fear—until Matthew thunks the blade down into a cutting board.

“Try chopping the steaks tonight?”

She breathes, and scowls.

Hacking chunks of meat into bite-sized pieces before cooking them is a luxury. It expends energy and time that Rey hasn’t ever had to spare, with her quivering muscles and a hunger-curling gut after the day’s work.

It’s vanity, eating nice like that.

And before this season, she’s never had enough to eat to warrant chopping her meal down into pieces.

Rey has no possible reason to share any of this with Matthew.

“If you cut off your thumbs—” she warns him when she returns from the smokehouse with steaks in hand and two bell peppers from her garden.

“It’s my own fault.” He swings the knife in a practiced, whistling arc.

Matthew slices open the peppers and reduces Rey’s steaks to mincemeat with a brutal efficiency that she ignores. Unwisely, it’s true, but she won’t admire it; and if she watches him work, she won’t be able to help herself. She pries open her customary tinned beans and empties them to heat in a pot. Peppers and minced wolf-steaks go in after the beans, hissing and steaming with a fragrance that pools saliva across her tongue while she browns them together. Half-fragments of memory prompt her to dip into her sack of flour with a spoon, stirring it into the simmering meat and legumes to form a thickened sauce from their drippings.

It tastes so, so good.

“Do you have any salt?” Matthew asks when they’ve taken their seats, sniffing at a spoonful of almost-stew. “Or pepper?”

This is the best meal Rey’s tasted in years, and he wants something _else_?

“So now you’re making demands?” Her stomach clenches around the gulping swallows she’s scarfed down in pure animal pleasure.

He cocks an eyebrow. “I only asked.”

“Well, I have what you see.” Rey jerks a tight jaw at her kitchen shelves. “And I haven’t been able to ride into Sweet Springs to barter for anything else.”

“It’s fine. It’s good,” he clarifies a little too quickly.

Yes, it is. And Rey’s half-grateful that he’s being an ass about her seasonings, because then she doesn’t have to feel thankful to him for suggesting this meal. This good, good food that she’s denied herself, always worried about leaner days to come. She doesn’t have to be thankful that he’s helped her make it.

So it’s fine that he’s an ass.

But over the next days, he’s sometimes a useful ass. Skinning squirrels and rabbits when Rey checks her traplines. Planing another batch of shingles after she’s pegged all the ready-hewn slabs to her tar-paper. Hacking out a cap for the roofline so that weather can’t dribble between the shingles’ topmost ridges and into her shanty. While branding the newest crop of two-month-old calves, he even manages to hammer some functionality back into her frying pan; Matthew uses the cattle brand to melt and soften the pan’s metal, and a mallet to pound it smooth. He thins the bottom marginally to cover its scorching like patching broken pieces in a pie crust.

The pan’s functional enough to cook on that night, even if it smokes a bit.

A lot, really. Enough that Rey has to rush the frying pan off her stove to cool in dark-dewed grasses near the porch. Since the night’s pleasant enough with a breeze carrying the comfortable sounds of lowing cattle and a lone bullfrog from the creek, and the shanty’s full of smoke—its tidy, shingled roof traps the stove's gray belches from rising out of the room—they eat outside. They share the frying pan between them in lieu of plates or bowls.

She’ll save time spent hauling water from the river for washing more dishes, Rey rationalizes when Matthew offers her the single spoon. Besides, the pan’s too hot to eat out of with naked fingers. So they share the spoon, too.

She polishes the utensil clean on her cuff after each use.

Matthew doesn’t.

When they return to the aired-out shanty and into the oil lamp’s glow, he has dirty smears of their meal tangled in a beard shadowing his jaw. Rey twitches her eyebrows at this scruffiness. He should’ve cleaned the spoon.

“What?” Matthew asks when she _tsk_ s her tongue against her teeth, scrubbing at the frying pan with a piece of soapy burlap over her washbasin.

Rey tosses the cloth to him. She scrapes her nails along a recalcitrant legume burned into the pot's bottom. “For your face.”

Matthew catches the rag and applies it to his jaw. He grimaces when the clot snags on coarse black bristles. “I need to shave.”

“So shave.” With the pan as clean as she can make it, Rey dries it on her sleeve. She points to her knives hanging beside the cookstove while she stacks her crockery away.

Matthew directs a dubious glance at the wicked, glinting blades—Rey prides herself on their sharpness; they’re certainly as good as any straight razor.

“And if I slit my throat, it’s my own fault,” he mutters.

She shrugs.

“But you’re a woman,” he grouses, scratching his jaw. “How do you not have a mirror?”

“Why would I need one?”

He snorts incredulously. “Because I—I don’t…” Matthew makes a wild gesture of incomprehension that she’s not understanding something so obvious. “Don’t all pretty women—”

Rey stops breathing, pulse drumming loudly in her ears where she stands half-turned from the stove.

Her hunted, haunted stillness seems to choke off his words. Matthew's gesticulating hands hang awkwardly in the air. Then they drop down to his sides, smacking his thighs. But he snaps barely a moment later, blowing out his breath, “Never mind. You’re right. Why would you have a mirror?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rey retorts, grateful to return to familiar territory. Breathing again. But she finds her fingers straying to the bun coiling up her dirty, snarled hair. Scowling, she drops her hand.

“I said never mind!”

Matthew drops into the straw-tick, hefts his splinted leg up on the mattress, and turns away onto his side. Rey glares, but he doesn’t move. He still hasn’t moved when she returns from settling her cattle for the night—Little Bee had snorted reproachfully at her harsh neck-reining. Though she prepares herself for sleep in her rocking chair and quilt with exaggerated noise, he doesn’t stir to cover his ears or snap at her to be quiet.

What a tempest in a teapot over a mirror and shave!

Grumbling to herself, Rey slumps into her chair and blows out the lamp.

She wakes dead-alert in the night’s dark reaches to realize: he’d been about to call her _pretty_.

Which must be bad, because her stomach clenches and roils. Hot and cold together, shivers chase over her skin. It feels like a fever, knowing that Matthew thinks she’s pretty.

She wants to vomit, or sing.

Rey tries to lull herself back to sleep with the rocking chair’s soothing glide on its casters, as Mama had done when she’d been ill as a child.

She fails.

In the next week, they repair the calving enclosure again and finish the roof’s shingling. Sometimes they eat plain tinned beans and sometimes minced steak with peppers, savoring wedges of cut melon after the meal. Neither of them mention what was almost said on the night of the smoking frying pan. When they’d talked about shaving and mirrors. Which they don’t discuss again. Matthew’s beard thickens and spreads up his cheeks to his hairline. He looks like a wildman, grimy and hairy.

Rey’s not much better.

Fortunately, her monthly bath is due in a few days’ time.

It’s not that she _likes_ fully bathing only once each month. But Rey gets dirty so quickly from a single day of ranching chores that trying to keep her nails, ears, and the crevasses behind her knees clean every day—or even every week—is more trouble than it’s worth. And then there’s the embarrassing issue of blood waking between her thighs every moon. Better to just bathe when it dries up, she’s learned.

“Next Monday’s bathing day,” she tells Matthew, breaking a long silence between them on the porch. They're sitting well away from each other, Matthew skinning another round of coveys and Rey frowning over Little Bee’s harness, plying it between her fingers and trying to patch or coax the leather and corroded iron rings into lasting a little longer. Jerking the tanned lines, she continues, “I go down to a creek behind the ranch. The bank’s not too steep for your crutches, and there’s privacy in some shallow water if you want it.”

Matthew turns over his bloody hands, examines his bare, dirty foot. He scratches a nail through the tangled month-long growth on his jaw. He grimaces. And nods.

They’re down in the pastures driving Rey's herd back to its calving enclosure from watering at a nearby vernal pool when Matthew shouts behind her. Millie brays an angry protest. Rey whirls her mustang in a dusty skid, already reaching for her shotgun on an instinct strong as breathing—but there are no rustlers riding over the ridge, no wolves stalking through the bright, winking sunlight.

Instead: Matthew’s slapping his own face with flailing arms and legs. Millie’s reins flap loose against her mane, neck-reining her this way and that without rhyme or reason so that she bellows in confused displeasure.

A contraction of powerful painted haunches sends Little Bee springing into a gallop, carrying Rey toward the man and mule without conscious thought. “What’s wrong—” she yells to Matthew, while he continues to shout and strike like a madman.

“Wasp! God damn it—it’s caught—my beard—” He yelps again. “ _Hell_ , that hurts—”

“Stop squirming, you’ll just agitate it!” Rey reins in Little Bee with a spurt of earth. She grabs Matthew’s shoulder.

“Easy for you to say—”

“Sit still!” She smacks the flat of her hand into his ear, a painless but incapacitating strike. While Matthew grunts and stammers, Rey leans in to part the black growth on his jaw where he’s been slapping himself. The skin beneath his beard is an angry red, irritated from the insect's thrashing. Very, very carefully, she teases apart matted hair where the trapped wasp’s wings flutter.

“Still,” she breathes against his sting-swollen flesh. “Be very still.” Another judicious twitch from her nails...and the tangles part just enough from the remains of a food-hardened snarl—an angry, frightened wasp buzzes free. It spits past Matthew’s nose; he tracks its retreat with loathing until its zig-zagging shape and whirring noise fades. Then, he sags.

“Thank you.” Wincing, he brushes his fingertips over the stings.

“You idiot,” Rey tells him. “Always hold still if you’ve accidentally caught a bee or a wasp.”

“Fine for you to say, when you’re not getting stung over and over again.” One of his nails scratches against the bumps rising on his jaw. Matthew hisses and drops his hand.

“I’ve had them stuck in my hair before. It happens a few times every spring, when the clover’s in bloom.”

“And you never get stung, of course.”

“No,” she says, “I’ve been stung too many times to count. Until I learned to be still. My fear only made the wasps mad.”

Matthew just looks at her, shaking his head. His mouth is drawn with pain at multiple swelling stings, but he doesn’t whimper or cry. Again, she has to admire his fortitude. The first time a wasp caught itself under her hair, stinging until it died, she’d screamed for so long that her voice gave out.

Rey clears her throat. “The best relief for stings like these is mud. Come on.”

Clicking her tongue to Little Bee, she leads Matthew and Millie up from the pasturelands and to the shanty. She dismounts to grab her keenest paring knife, soap, and her burlap washcloth, then takes them down behind the ranch to where a stand of poplar trees undulate in the looming mountains’ shade. A shallow, chattering river winds its course between sun-dappled trunks and graceful, glossy shadows falling down from the ridge.

Millie kneels at Rey’s command. She helps Matthew along the bank on his crutches, both bracing their heels against the slope’s loose earth until they stand on firm river stones. Cheerful water laps against the toes of their boots. Gesturing for Matthew to seat himself on a mossy, flat-topped rock that she’s often used for sunning and drying her skin after bathing, Rey lathers her burlap and soap. She tests the edge of her paring knife against a finger. Perfectly sharp.

“The mud will work better if your skin’s clean,” she tells him, approaching with her dripping, soapy burlap. “If there’s more contact.”

Matthew flinches when she smoothes the cloth and soap over his jaw, swirling through the bristly hairs, working up a lather on his beard.

“Rey—”

“You’re getting a shave after all. I’ll try not to slit your throat. But you can’t talk, or I might.” She tilts an eyebrow at him.

“Because my throat would be moving,” he mumbles, lips fluttering against suds dripping from his mustache. He spits.

“Because you’re annoying as the sweet lord’s worst hell when you talk.” Rey raises her paring knife, showing him the glint of sunlight off its blade. She advances until she stands between his knees. Again, she lifts an eyebrow.

Matthew swallows, skin darkening across his cheekbones. Carefully, he nods.

Shaving a man can’t be so different from shaving patches of hair on a horse or cow before she applies a poultice. Can it?

Catching lines of soap dribbling down his cheek with her cloth, Rey works the suds into Matthew’s sideburns. Once the coarse black bristles foam with lather, she grips her paring knife near the blade with an index finger stretched along its blunt side. Then she scrapes the cutting edge smoothly, gently down his cheek in a single stroke. This first pass culls away the worst hair growth, exposing short stubble. After splashing her knife clean in the river, Rey lathers Matthew’s cheek again and draws down her blade for a second time. She has to lean close in her care not to nick his jaw. Skin emerges in a pale stripe beneath her steel.

“Breathe,” she reminds him when his nostrils flare and his throat bobs.

“Didn’t want to...distract you,” he mutters in a hoarse voice.

“I’m not distracted.”

Except that she is.

The instant that Rey gives her promise, she can’t keep focused. She has to steady Matthew’s jaw in her hand to barber his chin, turning him this way and that as she would an apple she’s peeling. But this work is nothing like her mundane tasks in the kitchen. Her fingers’ pads are rough, and Matthew’s freshly shaven skin is supple. The clashing textures make her wink and shake her head. A strange, warm sensation coils low in her belly when he exposes his throat to her while she shaves the bulge of his Adam’s apple. Soap smears her fingers, making her grip treacherous; she wipes a hand across her trouser thigh. Matthew’s eyes linger over a damp stripe she leaves on the cloth.

Shifting her stance between his knees to curve her knife along his jaw’s square line, nearing the irritated patch of skin puckered and humped with boil-like stings, Rey  _hmph_ s around a dry tongue.

“Steady,” Matthew warns her, barely moving his lips while her knife glides beneath them. A palm braced on his leg raises to cup the back of Rey’s knee.

It’s an innocent spot. But if he’s aiming to stabilize her, he fails.

Folding her mouth, inhaling sharply through her nose, Rey steels herself against Matthew’s touch. Her knife curves along his stung skin, barely skimming the flesh, scraping away a last patch of bristled black hair. She needs to get a fine shave for her mud plaster to be effective. Its cool compress should be applied directly on Matthew’s irritated lumps to leach out the sting from the wasp’s panicked thrashing...but she doesn’t trust herself to work more closely than she does.

A vomiting pulse contracts again in her throat. Her stomach lurches up against her ribcage, fluttering with song.

Matthew tugs the knife away before she drops it or clutches the blade too tightly and slits his throat. His fingers rise along her knee, to her thigh. “Rey—”

“T-the mud. Mud,” she stammers. Her legs wobble—these damn river stones shifting beneath her. She hurries to the water’s edge, dredging her hands into viscous silt. Palms cupped around a dripping glob of mud, she stumble-strides back to Matthew and all but smacks the natural poultice against his jaw.

“Rey—” he speaks her name again.

“Hold that there,” she orders him when the mud immediately begins soften and slide. Her voice is too harsh, too loud. Overriding whatever he keeps trying to say.

She doesn’t want to hear it.

She can’t hear it. She just can’t.

“And don’t watch me.”

Kicking off her boots, a hot ache clenching fiercely in her stomach, Rey wades out into the stream. She follows its course upriver until she’s hidden behind a curved, grassy bank and a growth of poplars chuckling in the breeze. She unbuttons her shirt and strips off her trousers, scrubs them with soap, then weighs them down under rocks in the burbling water to rinse. Kneeling, she splashes chilly ripples over her shoulders. She cools her cheeks and calms herself.

Slightly.

Concave dents in her ankles and the crooks of her elbows—overlooked places—receive the chafing of their lives. Rey blesses the burlap’s hard scratch across her skin. Almost painful. Distracting. She scrubs her underarms and her dirty feet. The nape of her neck, and her knees. She’s washing her thighs and her stomach’s slight curve when the cloth catches in a trickster current. Twisting in the water like a sneaky living thing, its hem darts down to tickle the dark curls between her legs.

She jolts, gasping at the unexpected contact. A shudder seizes the base of her spine. This— _this_...she freezes as shame paints a scarlet swath over her cheeks at such sharp—

 _Pleasure_.

She keeps very still, willing the flush creeping over her breasts to fade. Currents swirl the burlap’s hem again. She catches her lower lip between her teeth, muffling a little bleating sound in her throat. Her knees weaken. She...she...sinks lower into the water, eyes hooding guiltily while the cloth teases between her thighs once more, her gaze fixed on the curving bank. Matthew waits on its far side...smooth skin, fingers cupping the backs of her legs…

One hand slips down to anchor herself with clutching fingers on a river stone, holding her body submerged to the peaks of her breasts. Water swirls around her beading nipples with tantalizing little strokes. Her other hand with the burlap dips between her legs. Her fingers creep among the curls, parting them very slightly so that the fluttering cloth wriggles against a nub of exquisite sensation at the apex of her thighs. Her breath catches and her belly trembles.

Taut muscles in her shoulders soften like butter in sunshine. Rey’s head falls back while her fingers join the burlap, swirling, warmth in her flesh and cool rippling water, wind murmuring beside her, coaxing…

She likes the roughness of her fingers, the work-made serrations rousing skittering, untasted sensations from her sex to her tongue, mouth open, breathing in shallow gasps between ruddy lips—quicker now, toes curling off the riverbed.

Matthew’s fingers are broader than her own, rougher—and larger hands might leave a thumb rotating against her nub while a long, dextrous digit drifts lower, parting her core...

Currents slide into her body, tiny wavelets fluttering within her flesh, building slowly yet inexorably as she shifts against her fingers and the water, muscles contracting around her spine, whimpering, pulsing, a thundering roar in her ears as Rey’s head dips back beneath the surface—bearing down and heaving upward.

A shudder surges through the river, erupting in a sunlit spray that has her moaning and clenching around her fingers—

But then the banks are crumbling, chunks of loose earth caving and splashing into the water, dousing her in silt, hard pebbles grazing her cheeks—Rey’s eyes fly open, straight into the sun—no longer noonday’s brilliant amber, but doused in plumes of whirling ash—

A gust of wind through the poplars wafts an acrid stench over the stream's weakened, dissolving banks. Rey's nostrils burn. Retching at the odor, inhaling and choking on a mouthful of muddy water, she flails upright and scrambles out of the river.

 _What in the sweet lord’s will_ …

“Rey? _Rey!_ ” Matthew, yelling her name.

Rey dives back down the bank for her clothes, jerking the garments on over wet skin. Seams tear, but she has no time to waste on niceties like stitching and buttons. She has to get back to her ranch. And once she’s secured her home, she’ll gallop up to Sweet Springs, spurring Little Bee to the edge of his endurance. Because this can only be—

“The railroad line,” Matthew’s struggling onto his crutches, mud dripping from his jaw and splattering his chest like an open wound. He points to the valley’s northern ridge, where a gaseous cloud filters against the horizon. “That looks like nitroglycerin.”

Rey doesn’t question how he knows this detail. It’s enough that it’s happened.

She hauls him along the bank and shoves him in Millie’s general direction. She can’t help him. Not now. Not anymore. Not if what he’s told her about the railroad is true. It’s coming, and—

She can’t have any distractions.

“Matthew,” Rey mounts into her stirrups and gathers up a jigging Little Bee’s reins, “it’s time for you to leave.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Gasp* whomp, whomp...
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	7. Chapter 7

Ren follows Rey’s galloping mustang at a canter on Millie. His left leg throbs, knitted bones protesting their sudden hard usage, but he doesn’t try to rein the mule down to a walk. Unhindered by pressure from the bridle’s bit across her tongue, Millie pounds out an awkward four-beat gait while chasing after Little Bee’s agile legs; Ren thinks his spine might shake apart from the jolting. He suspects that when Rey rides the mule, Millie likely picks up her hooves enough for her gait to resemble an actual canter. Just a suspicion...but for the moment, they surge along the bank and back toward the shanty at this punishing pace.

With the jouncing and his miserable aches, he can’t catch his breath to shout Rey’s name again.

And what good would it do?

 _It’s time for you to leave_.

Her words by the creek had knocked the wind from his gut— _hard to breathe, so hard, choking on nothing, the words she won’t let him say_ —and he’s grateful for the distance between them as they ride up to the porch, Rey already swinging down from her stirrups and striding into the shanty. Her cabin's still standing, though the wolf pelt has come loose from its pegs and sways against the wall in a drunken parody of life. She’s back with her shotgun and a whiskey bottle, shrugging a man’s vest over her sodden shirtwaist and jerking down the pelt by the time Ren manages to coax Millie to her knees. He staggers out of the saddle, grabbing for his crutches tied onto the horn. Rey doesn’t look at him while she rolls the wolf pelt into her saddlebags, cushioning the whiskey bottle. Again, he’s grateful—without his scraggling bead to conceal it, his mouth is gray with pain.

And panic.

“Stay here. I’ll be back in an hour.” Rey sheaths her shotgun into its saddle holster and vaults back up onto Little Bee. “I can’t spare Millie, but I’ll get a horse for you.”

He finds his voice, then. “Rey—”

“Morphine too, if you need it.”

Morphine from Sweet Springs. She’s going to the town.

Of course she is. And as soon as she sees the posters, she’ll know.

“Rey…” He hates how he cracks over her name. If he could just explain...if he had time...but she’s itching to be off, and she won’t listen now.

 _She’ll know what everyone else knows_.

“I’m sorry. There’s no time,” Rey echoes Ren’s own thoughts. A spur of her heels breaks Little Bee into a gallop. She’s gone in moments, a trail of dust rising from the mustang’s pounding hooves as Rey rides down toward the pastures, circles her herd once to check the cattle enclosure for damage, then swings left through the valley. She urges Little Bee faster, faster, disappearing behind a rise of sun-burnished pinnacles and sloping, rocky hills.

The way to Sweet Springs.

Ren watches her go, hands limp around his crutches, left leg aching with exertion and his hard-beating pulse throbbing through the tendons. He just stands. One minute. Another. Gradually, dust settles. The frantic caws of disturbed ravens draw to quiet complaints. Cattle cease their agitated lowing. Silence roosts again, only a shifting wind puffing at detritus blown high above the valley hinting at the explosive, devastating upheaval that’s taken place.

He stands so long that his shadow creeps away from him across the ground, and Millie falls to grazing.

He doesn’t know what else to do.

Because what in the devil’s name _can_ he do now?

He needs the horse from Sweet Springs for which Rey’s bartering; Millie would never consent to carry him away from the ranch alone. The mule is cropping grass with vengeful snaps of her yellowed teeth, and Ren’s rarely known an animal to eat with such forbidding gusto. She wouldn’t even have to work much to bite through his hand, or take a finger clean off. She certainly won’t kneel for him to mount up again unless she feels like it.

Another snap of her teeth and a snort tell him that she isn’t feeling charitable.

Well, he can’t get far on his crutches. He might be all right through the valley lowlands. But scaling ridges and up mountain passes to search out the remote places where his gang will have taken cover to wait and watch for him—surely they would’ve waited this long, their fear making them patient, better to wait than face his rage, and they need him to head their crew; _there's no Ren Seven without Kylo Ren_ , he reminds himself—is impossible on foot with only one steady leg.

But he also can’t stay on Rey’s ranch.

At the pace she’s set, she’ll have reached Sweet Springs by now. She’ll have seen the posters. And she’ll know.

She’ll know who he is.

 _Kylo Ren, leader of the Ren Seven. Outlaw, robber, thief, murderer_.

He has to do something—but his mind’s a whirring blank. Shadows from the porch edge further west and twine themselves around his shoulders, and still he remains where he’s watched Rey ride off.

Murmuring water beside them, she’d stood between his knees with her fingers grazing his throat, eyes almost crossed in concentration while she’d gently, gently scraped her knife along his jaw. Almost tender, and he hadn’t been able to help himself when swaying patches of poplar shade shifted away from her freckled cheeks, fluttering light tracing down through the leaves to gild her sun-kisses. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from resting a hand on the back of her knee. That little catch of breath on her lips, her determined frown, _so_ determined to ignore him and the blush touching her cheekbones with faint, rosy color...

If he hadn’t spoken her name— _wondering, asking_ —would she have continued her soft touches, soothing better than the mud she’d slapped onto the wasp stings puckering his jaw?

But he’s a fool.

He’d spoken, shattering echoes she’d permitted to sing between them by the river, willing and lovely—

And then the nitroglycerin explosion. There’s no mistaking its percussive sharpness and spewing gases, so different from the earthy roar of flaring, flashing dynamite.

It haunts him, waking him from sleep with thrashing terror.

 _That sound_. Following him.

Back here, to this place. To Rey.

Who certainly knows who he is. _What_ he is. And she’ll know the lies he’s told her—as few as he could help, but too many.

 _Matthew_.

Well, Matthew’s a cunt.

Matthew would probably hobble up the shanty's steps, making sure that the oil lamp hadn’t tipped over as the ground vibrated and sang. Perhaps he'd begin warming up a tin of beans for when Rey comes home, hungry and tired from dealing with the people and town. Then he’d sit on the porch and wait for her return. She’d ride up on her pinto mustang, fury and betrayal curving down her chapped mouth, shouting at him. Almost as though she’s in pain. But he’d look her straight in those hurt hazel eyes with their sun-blonde lashes and their delicately tilted corners, a hint of tears brightening their edges. And he’d ask for her forgiveness.

Yes, Matthew’s a cunt.

But Ren doesn’t know what else to do. If he tries to run, Rey will shoot him between the shoulder blades, riding him down across the pastures as he stumbles along and firing without hesitation. She’ll probably put a bullet between his eyes if he stays.

He has to do...something.

What can he offer her in a bargain? Nothing much. The only things he has left are the contents of his saddlebags. If he offers them to her freely...hiding nothing...

It won’t appease her. Not if she’s seen the posters with crimes laid out in stark printing beneath his face.

 _Kylo Ren_.

But he has to try.

Groaning at throbbing spasms from his leg, at the sting lacerating his jaw and delving deep into his chest, Ren shuffles to Millie, grabs her reins, and leads her back to the barn.

—

The bell tower of Sweet Springs’ church rises through a cleft in the dusty hillside path that marks an eastern road into the town between humped, grass-tufted hills. Rey’s always hated the artificial whitewash that the townsfolk persist in lathering along that spire—an almost monthly task, with noonday sun burning down and fading the paint over and over again. Perhaps they’d have gotten the message that their aggressive righteousness in the light and their double-dealing after nightfall is unwelcome in this land, where all life exists on a spectrum of guilty gray and offers no pretense otherwise.

But no.

Expecting such understanding from the people in Sweet Springs is a madness that Rey won’t repeat. A girl of twelve hadn’t known any better, trusting what she saw, believing what she was told. Lips curled into a scowl so that spewing grit coats her teeth, Rey spits and pities the child she’d been. She gallops into the outskirts without slackening pace, riding straight down the main street for a decrepit tannery across town. Indignant voices erupt in her wake as Little Bee scatters a herd of goats and leaps over a rolling beer barrel that’s toppled off a saloon porch from some merry brawl. Shouted curses, agitated chickens clucking and squawking within coops strapped to market wagons, a prospector’s donkey braying at the dusty commotion—the mustang swerves around obstacles and bellowed threats of pursuit without a break in speed. Ladies with parasols and dainty shoes shriek and draw their skirts away from plumes of dirt that Little Bee’s hooves kick onto the street's boardwalk. Dogs rouse and bark from lounging before barbershops and cobblers’ stores, or yank against their tethers at bars. Yet Rey and her mustang are too swift to be caught, galloping ahead of the barrage, outrunning it.

Still. She hates this town. Noisy, dirty. Horrible place.

But she needs a horse for Matthew, and she needs information.

Little Bee skids to a stop, hocks sliding in the dirt when Rey reins him up before the tanner’s greasy storefront. Bubbling vats of ammonia or salted fat leak putrid odors of urine and decay through the building’s clapboard walls. Rey likes this place better than Sweet Springs’ row of little shopfronts and tea rooms. She prefers it to streets flocked with pretty women in clothes that she hates—yes, she _hates_ them, stupid silks and ribbons, useless things, fluttering like courting butterflies—and well-groomed men who wear respectable hats and polished pocket watches as armor to do whatever they please.

But this place, these people on the far side of town—she understands them.

“Patterson!” she calls, hauling the wolf hide from her saddlebags. “I’ve got a pelt for trading.”

A pause. A clatter as a rank, dripping paddle is withdrawn from a vat and set aside. Then a stooping, cantankerous figure scrapes open the building’s door several inches over its grimy threshold. Patterson’s half-blind with his trade, eyes a milky blue from bending over steaming cisterns and noxious splashing things. But he’s as sharp as Rey remembers from when she’d last tried to trade a bundle of rabbit pelts for a sack-backed mule.

“Quality?”

“Good. Buffalo wolf hide, already skinned and cleaned. If you’ll trade, I want the best you have in your pens for it. And quickly.”

He shambles forward into the street when Rey unfurls her rolled hide as a lure. Squinting against the light, he fingers the coarse fur and leathery skin beneath it with appreciation. “Nothing so good today…” Patterson mumbles. 

“Then I’ll take whatever’s least bad.”

The tanner gives Rey her pick of a dozen dull-eyed animals in the pens behind his shop. Most are half-dead before he even touches them, turning their hides into shoes for women taking tea on Sweet Springs’ better streets, or skinning them for rugs. Rey rides off with a listless mare a few minutes later, the animal’s ribs heaving through a thin, dusty coat. She could be a chestnut. Tired, grateful, and bewildered, the mare follows Little Bee without fuss or even a lead line, resting her muzzle on his rump. The mustang’s ears flick at this presumptuous contact, but Rey clicks her tongue and he doesn’t lash out.

This creature's definitely the best of Patterson’s sorry lot, but one good kick will probably topple her permanently in her current state. Recalling a long-eared mule with dim eyes who'd only needed care and attention to be the most willingly, lively companion, Rey vows to be as gentle with this mare as she can while the horse is under her guard.

Some in the pens are too broken for even this hope.

She’s left them to their fate.

They’re too tired to fight it. There’s nothing she can do.

At the surgeon’s one-room practice, reeking more awfully of disease and blood than the town’s slaughterhouse, she exchanges her potent whiskey for a needle and a vial of morphine. Some men in Sweet Springs prefer alcohol for their procedures, anyhow. Dr. Clark’s already uncorking the bottle before his door swings shut on Rey’s heels.

“This won’t hurt at all,” he tells an apprehensive man waiting for attention on a dirty wooden table, slashes from a bar fight’s broken bottle gashing his shoulder. Dr. Clark takes a satisfied slug from Rey’s whiskey and approaches his patient with a needle and sutures. Through the window as she strides away, Rey sees the man blanch.

Perhaps the doctor will share his bartered spirits. Perhaps not.

Rey doesn’t bother hitching her mare when she dismounts near the ramshackle dancehall-cum-courthouse, where the mayor has an office with clean windows and a scent of expensive wood polish and superiority. No one will bother stealing the old thing if she’s been sent to the tanner already. Neither does she hitch Little Bee. He’s patient and devoted as a dog, and there’s a slight chance that Rey will need to ride out of Sweet Springs faster than she’s come in.

She’s not precisely a welcome presence in the town.

And she hasn’t bothered to disguise herself with skirts and braids. They make her feel too young.

They make her feel powerless.

Stomping along boardwalk planking that leads up the street to the courthouse, she ignores faces hurrying to law office windows or already pressed up against the stationer’s panes as she passes. She refuses to acknowledge their curiosity or glance aside from her goal, lips pinched between her teeth. She holds her shotgun tucked under one arm in a deterrent, if not an outright threat to any man pondering grabbing her ass, when—

“Miss Ridley?”

Scowling, Rey ducks her chin and walks faster, heels thunking echoes against the boards. Some men can’t take a hint. Still, she’d prefer to keep her threat as a deterrent only, rather than shooting someone in plain daylight in the Sweet Springs streets.

“Rey! Sweetheart, is that you?”

 _Sweetheart_.

Reluctantly, grudgingly, she halts.

 _Sweetheart_. There’s only one man alive who calls her that. She hates his pet names—but Poe Dameron’s not dangerous. At least, not to her.

All the other women in Sweet Springs would disagree. Likely some of the men, too.

He’s been decent to her in the past, when she’d been too young to know better than to walk alone in certain parts of town while asking for help. And now...still those _sweethearts_ , when he hasn’t seen her in more than two years. As though no time at all has passed since she rode into Sweet Springs on her twenty-first birthday to stake a claim to her family’s land, backed once and for all by the Homestead Act.

Gritting her teeth into a sigh now, Rey turns. She nods at the short, swaggering man with his smile glittering beneath a creamy Stetson as he catches her up. “Mr. Dameron.”

“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!” When Rey just raises her eyebrows, holding her shotgun and her unfriendly posture, the gunslinger ceases his attempts to catch and kiss her hand. Playing as if she were a real lady and he not a scoundrel.

“What do you want, Mr. Dameron?” Yet Rey’s tone isn’t quite as steely as she’s meant it to be. With his flashy grin and cock-sure confidence, Poe Dameron could charm butter into melting on ice in the dead of winter. Rey’s not charmed—not by a long shot—but she’s not...angry. Not as much as she should be at this interruption, certainly.

“To know why you’re headed for the courthouse with a look on your face like you’ve stepped in dog shit, and you’re going after the owner with that shotgun. I’d warn you, sweetheart, the mayor’s not in a good mood today.”

Armitage Hux, mayor of Sweet Springs after ousting the previous official on a legal technicality that’d made Rey’s blood boil with its injustice, before she’d retreated onto her ranch and into her work. At least she’d preserved herself.

“Well, I’ll just wish him a good afternoon and be on my way,” she retorts with a sarcastic curl to her lip. She sidesteps Dameron, but he touches her shoulder.

“Don’t go in there, Rey. He’s pissed as all hell, and he’s looking for someone to use as a whipping boy. There was an explosion on the railroad line earlier this morning. He’s ordered me to haul a culprit to jail by the week’s end, or I’m out of what little favor I’ve got left. And a job.”

“You’re a gunslinger. You’ll always have a job out here.” There will always be little girls who need a Poe Dameron to protect them from the Unkar Plutts of this world. At least until those girls grow up enough to shoot the sick bastards dead themselves. “Besides, I thought that’d be Sheriff Canady’s job.”

“He’s mustering deputies, all right. But firing the sheriff’s harder than taking away my nice white hat and license to do whatever I like.” Dameron thumbs his brim, grinning sourly. A single tooth catches the sunlight so that his smile glints. “And Hux is a vindictive bastard.”

Oh, yes. Dameron’s a charming rogue even when he’s bitter. Rey had briefly been a little sweet on him as a child...until she’d learned that he was more interested in his own pretty face than any of the Sweet Springs women. Until she'd learned that she didn't need a protector.

“Still playing hero?” she asks, slightly relaxing her shotgun into the crook of her elbow.

“Still playing rancher?”

“I’m not playing.”

“Neither am I.” Dameron sobers. “And you do not want to see Hux today, or even this week. He’s on a warpath, Rey. Thinks it was the Ren Seven that set charges and blew a hundred feet of rail line on his watch. Old fears, and my dollar’s on some curious, quick-fingered kid. But he’s shitting himself about what the company executive’s going to say. Or do. I’m betting he’ll haul off any troublemaker he can get. Show that he’s doing _something_.”

“I’m not a troublemaker.” Rey crosses her arms and glares at him.

Dameron looks her up and down, shaking his head mournfully so that a few tight curls escape under his hat’s brim. “Sweetheart, you’re a walking _advertisement_ for trouble. Sight better looking than that fellow, though.” He jerks his thumb at a yellowing flyer tacked up on a post nearby, the old paper peeling with exposure to sun and weather.

 _Wanted: Members of the Ren Seven_ , a headline blares in block print. Rey’s never looked overlong at Sweet Springs’ posters before. She doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to see, because she knows those men got clean away with their crimes and she can’t stand it. She’s about to scoff and turn from this pitiful attempt at diverting her attention, to shoulder past Dameron and demand answers about the damn railroad plans from the mayor, when she sees…

His face.

The sketch is poor, the features exaggerated into ugliness. Enormous ears, shaggy black hair to his shoulders, gruesome moles like pox marks on his cheeks and forehead, thrice-broken nose above a mouth that’s leering and lopsided on the chin.

If she’d only seen him in poor light or down the end of a rifle’s barrel, Rey might’ve nodded agreement with the sketch. It’s a terrifying face, an angry or frightened hand wielding the ink. Not soft with sleep on a pillow, or frowning in concentration while steadying a ladder. Or looking up beneath hooded lids while she bends near, scraping her knife gently along his jaw.

It’s Matthew.

“Kylo Ren,” Dameron tells her, though she can read the name clearly enough. It’s printed in the headline’s same block lettering so that even illiterate readers will know who this man is. Below the name? An offered reward of twenty-five dollars for bringing the man with this face to justice in Sweet Springs before the mayor.

 _Dead or alive_.

She’d known his name wasn’t Matthew.

“Rey?” Dameron’s jostling her shoulder, clearly worried that his diversion has worked too well. Left her in a stupor, or knocked the sense from her head. “Rey, are you—”

“Who...who is that?” Her finger trembles when she points to the sketch, to Kylo Ren.

To Matthew.

“Gang’s leader. Dangerous man. Surely even you’ve heard the stories? Word is, he’s killed dozens back east and on the plains. Robbed banks, killed hostages. Hasn’t been seen in these parts for a good decade or more, though…” Dameron trails off while she continues to stare at the sketch, her mouth small and white. “Why? You’ve got a look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Not a ghost,” Rey grits out between pinched lips, unable to look away from that face. That familiar face.

Matthew. _Outlaw. Killer. Widow-maker._

 _Orphan-maker_.

“Then have you...have you _seen_ this man? Rey, if you have—”

“I…”

 _Kylo Ren. Matthew_.

“No, I…I don’t know...”

The text beneath his picture’s twenty-five dollar reward reads, _Wanted for bank robbery, horse thieving, the torture of...the murder of_...but the names blur, and she can’t read them however much she squints. The print is tiny to list out all the dead on a single sheet of paper.

Rey'd never known their names.

She’d never seen the men who came to her family’s homestead. Not in the dark. Not with a quilt over her head and her nose full of ether. Lullaby aborted when a horse’s incautious neigh rang out as riders approached the cabin, a silent question passing between her parents— _who would come calling so late?_ —a pounding fist at the door, knocking it half off its hinges—a shotgun blast tearing through the planks and shattering Papa’s shaving mirror over the mantel— _Go, Caroline! Take Rachel and run. I’ll try to_ —Mama smuggling her out the house’s back window, breathless, mumbling her lullaby over and over, muffling Rachel Ridley’s terrified sobs as a second shotgun blast shattered the stars like the shaving mirror and Papa screamed—dosing her with ether when she couldn’t gulp back her cries into the quilt, howling at the sky in panic— _Papa Papa Papa_ —

 _Stay here, sweetheart. I’ll come back for you_.

But her mother had never come back. Splayed out on the ground before the porch with her dress hitched over her hips, her hand drooping open around a knife. The prints of men and horses all round her, bruises on her legs from the imprints of hands and shod hooves. Papa fallen in the doorway, an empty hollow in his chest, reaching for Mama with half his jaw blown away in a red smear over the boards.

So still.

She’d thought at first that they were sleeping, even like that. She hadn’t understood, had lapsed back into consciousness at dawn, finding herself hidden in thorn-strung bushes a half-mile from home. She'd only come round when it was already over and the men were gone. She hadn’t understood. Surely she would've felt some part of herself shatter when her parents left her and their bodies behind? The loving string beneath her ribs that tied to her mother’s heart and her father’s hands snapping apart...So she’d thought they were sleeping until she saw their faces, because—because—

“Rey? _Rey?_ Are you all right—” An echo...a different man, a different time.

“Fine,” Rey whispers, or tries to. Her tongue’s dead. “I’m fine.” Words she’d repeated to herself every day for more than a year, chanted with every breath. Reminding herself that she was still alive. After everything,  _she was still alive_. And what she’d had left after that night: her own living, breathing body that got cold when she slept in the open, and hungry when she had nothing to eat.

So she’d done something about her cold and her hunger. Found a way to survive.

Because she hadn’t wanted to die.

And she can do something about this, too. _This poster. This time._ Shaking her head to clear it, growling low in her throat with a determination that burns away her sudden, strickening grief, white-hot as the morning when she'd first woken alone— _rage and work, her only comforts_ —Rey turns on her heel. Boards squealing, she strides back to where Little Bee waits with pricked ears and the broken-down mare drowses, past curious windows and the faces within them, past other walkers on the street who stare and point at her snarled hair, her trousers.

“Where are you—”

“Not to see the mayor.” Dameron should be pleased.

But the gunslinger's voice cracks, seemingly more worried than before as he follows her down the boardwalk, trying to catch at her shoulder. “Rey, don’t do anything stupid—”

“Going to see Hux would’ve been stupid. I’m not.” Rey mounts up and claps her heels to Little Bee’s sides. He leaps forward. The chestnut mare galumphs through spewing dirt in his wake, eager to follow the mustang, to leave the town and tannery behind.

Dameron’s retort dims with dust and distance.

He’s offering advice that he’d probably ignore, so Rey feels justified in ignoring it also. She’s not a hero as he wants to be. As perhaps he is. She’s twelve again, with all her rage and her furious resolve to do _something_ , _anything_.

But now she’s strong enough.

Rey wears no crisp white Stetson. She has no heart of gold, no code to justify her violence. She doesn’t care. She’s just a woman seeking vengeance against this man and all the ones who’ve hurt her before.

When a shrill whistle pierces through the wind to strike her eardrums, shrieking over a northern range of hills beyond the town to where she rides south, thighs braced against Little Bee’s saddle, hands fisted in his mane, the mare galloping behind, she doesn’t rein in the mustang or swing him around to charge this threat. It’s the sound of metal and spikes and hammers; Rey’s heard it before. A call to work or meals for men on the railroad line.

Even with the explosion, their advance hasn’t stopped.

She’ll stop them. She has to. Soon.

But for now, she’s on a quest for vengeance.

And she has a gun.

—

Plumes of dust rise behind a familiar figure galloping between twisted, wind-tortured pinnacles as they catch the last edges of sun sinking behind the mountains. Dying light tips these columns with amber fire. Disturbances from Rey’s furious pace spiral into the air, looking like smoke. As though the land itself is aflame.

 _Hell on earth_ , Ren thinks.

He’s had over an hour to plan for her return. But the only course of action he’s come up with is to offer Rey his saddlebags and as much of the truth as he can bear and just... _hope_. It’s such a stupid, chancy idea.

It’s the only one he has.

So he watches her ride up on Little Bee with a sack-kneed chestnut in tow, his hands empty of knives or hatchets. Holding nothing with which to defend himself.

He’s goddamn terrified.

Because he’s under no illusion that Rey might shoot him on sight and have done with it. All her care not to kill him when Rey's believed that she’s guilty of maiming a—comparatively—innocent man, keeping him hidden while his leg mends from its break and bullet wound, looking after him so that he’ll heal well and quickly, with no evidence left behind of her culpability when she finally releases him.

And now this.

Rather than risk dangerous attention from the Sweet Springs lawmen, she could probably collect a reward on his head with a single pump of her shotgun’s action, finger firm on the trigger.

So yes, Ren is fucking terrified when Rey reins in her mount so swiftly that the mustang’s forelegs fling up in a rearing stop. Not so agile, the mare following close behind him bumps against Little Bee’s haunches. He squeals and kicks hard, clipping the mare’s shoulder, barely missing her chest and heart.

“Enough!” Rey says. Her voice is horribly soft while she dismounts and separates the horses with palms braced on their necks. Firm, but almost gentle with these creatures who dwarf her and obey her. A fluid movement unholsters her shotgun from Little Bee’s saddle with that same firm, gentle resolve.

But when she pumps the action, her eyes glitter.

Rey strides toward Ren, raising the shotgun’s stock to her shoulder, the barrel less cold than her gaze.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now, _Kylo Ren_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um...yeah. Sorry about this chapter ending!
> 
> (I'm not sorry.)
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	8. Chapter 8

Ren lifts his hands, offering open, empty palms. His surrender. His pulse hammers an erratic drumroll in his chest, jackknifing in his throat so fiercely that his vision fogs to gray at the edges. His mouth is dry as sand. Can she see his fear? How close he is to passing out?

But he’s stayed where he is when he could’ve run, facing her and this moment head-on.

Because he has to.

 _Rey_.

Her mouth is thin and white, a fine lace of blood leaking at one corner from where she’s bitten deep into her lip. She’s bled before him many times: nicking her thumb on a blade, calluses on her palms splitting open from rough, sweaty work with the searing-hot cattle brand. But this is the first time he knows that she’s bleeding because of him. Bitten half through her lip because of him.

He hates it.

“Rey…”

“Shut up!” She advances another foot closer, her shotgun’s barrel mere inches from his chest. “You just...just...I’m done with…could be accused...harboring a fugitive...actually _worse_...” But if she’s sputtering and breathless in her rage, spitting blood onto her chin, her hands are steel-steady on the gun.

“I don’t expect you to believe anything I say.”

Ren swallows, trying to keep still while instinct's shrill whine screams for him to knock aside the shotgun’s barrel—to make some desperate, futile last stand. He forces himself to simply hold Rey's livid, glittering gaze instead. Not challenging her, but showing her that he’ll bear any accusations she hurls at him without turning aside. Without flinching behind excuses and false words. He can only hope that she understands this. His tongue rasps the inner lining of his cheeks and gums.

“I’d be a fool to expect you to listen to me or believe me. I wouldn’t believe me, either.”

Though she’s ordered him to shut up and could enforce her command forever with a single twitching finger, Rey doesn’t stop him talking. She chews her lip and glares, continuing to advance until the shotgun’s cold, calculating muzzle dents into Ren’s dirty shirt. Every nerve shrieks for him to look down, to see the impending explosion of scarlet and bone. He braces himself not to.

“But I can show you,” he says. “Let me show you, Rey.”

“Show me what.” Her lips harden and roll inward. The words are a sibilant hiss between sharp cheekbones and a tightly held chin. Not a question. She’s already decided that she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about anything he might offer to appease the wrath scorching off her, this anger an odor all its own. The smell is metallic and undercut with a slight whiff of decay, as though from a long-festering bullet wound suddenly exposed to the sunlight in all its ugliness. _Burning with rage_ is such a trite expression, but Ren knows now what the hackneyed phrase looks like. It stands before him in a woman’s guise; if steel could burn, its wreckage seen through a haze of vibrant autumn leaves—this is how he’d describe Rey’s scowling glare. It’s beautiful, somehow. At the end, he remembers that she’s beautiful. _Terrifying_.

Because she doesn’t care.

He knows this.

But he has to try.

“I’m going to reach behind myself to show you.” He waits for her to blast a slug through his chest.

She doesn’t. The very slightest tic in one eyelid indicates permission. Or she’s just blinking against dirt coating her face after the grueling gallop back from Sweet Springs. Streaks of sweat curve over her cheekbones like tears.

Ren inches a hand onto the porch behind him. His fingers scrabble over his saddlebags’ leather, finding a clasp.

“Your saddlebags.” Rey jabs her shotgun’s barrel into his chest with enough force to bruise. “That’s all?”

“Back in the beginning, you wanted to know what I was carrying. I wouldn’t tell you.” Ren eases open the bag’s flap without breaking eye contact. He fumbles around in the alfalfa-dusted interior until a paper roll slices a blunt, jagged cut over his knuckles. “I hid these bags from you. Because if you saw what I had inside, you’d know the truth. Part of it, at least. Some. Too much, it seemed at the time. I didn’t want you to know.”

“No? Why might that be, _Kylo Ren_?” She spits the name as though it’s foul on her tongue.

He’s used to hearing himself spoken of in that tone. And he’s used to hearing his name muttered with a half-glance over the speaker’s shoulder, too—a shiver of fear. But Rey isn’t afraid, her glittering, fiery gaze locked on his. Perhaps her anger burns too brightly for other emotions. Or she’s never been afraid of him at all. She’s only ever been angry. Some people grow red and blustery with rage, and some sallow and still. The second could easily be mistaken for fear.

Beneath her dusty sweat, Rey is paler than whey.

“I didn’t want you to blast my head off with your shotgun. I didn’t want _this_.” Ren makes a very slight nod at the barrel between them, at the primed action, at Rey’s finger crooked on the trigger.

“You didn’t try very hard to stop me from riding to Sweet Springs.” Her lips curl, leaving a smear of blood on her chin. “Knowing what I’d find there.”

“How could I have stopped you?” He tries not to plead or wheedle. Pleading won’t do any good with her. “No one stops you from doing what you want to do, Rey.”

“You have. You and your kind.” She sprays red-flecked spittle. “Outlaws. Fugitives. Thieves. Murders. Men like—”

“Kylo Ren.”

He’s managed to keep her talking long enough to extract a furled paper from his saddlebag. Now he inches off a length of frayed twine that binds the sheet into a cylinder. The paper loosens in its curl with a dry crackling sound that has Rey jerking up on her shotgun, barrel suddenly jammed hard beneath Ren’s chin. If she depresses her trigger, she’ll blow the entire back of his skull clean off.

Except that it won’t be clean. Not at all.

With an immense effort of will that starts a twitch in his left eye, Ren nudges his mind away from that morbid reckoning. He nudges the paper too with his knuckles. He pushes it out from the saddlebag where it unfurls further, edges and ink soft with wear. Fluttering into the porch, the page flattens to expose its interior.

“Look,” he tells Rey. Implores her—yes, begging, even though he’s sworn to himself that he won’t.

 _Please_.

Rey’s eyebrows cinch into a single glowering line. She gives yet another emphatic thrust with her shotgun to the underside of Ren’s chin. He chokes, caught mid-swallow. While he’s disoriented from the blow, from the cold danger so intimately pressed against his skin, her eyes flit sideways and past him to the paper.

She stops breathing.

It’s his wanted poster, showing the insulting reward beneath his ugly, grimacing mug and a list of crimes printed in tiny text to encompass the full scope of Kylo Ren’s guilt. Marked over these crimes in other inks, some dried brown with age and barely legible, some stark and fresh, are minuscule annotations. Hundreds of them, lines connecting the notes to each atrocity with quavering arrows—indicative of having been drawn on horseback or upon another rough surface. _Stones. Trees._ Anywhere private he could find to hand.

“What _is_ this?” Rey snarls, gaze charring the paper.

But at least she’s framed her furious snap of teeth as a question, rather than an indictment. Such a little concession to dialogue.

“Kylo Ren’s wanted poster,” Ren tells her carefully.

“Yes, I can see that. What’s the other writing?”

“Notes.” He hardly dares to breathe with her shotgun denting the shaven underside of his jaw while he says, “ _My_ notes.”

“Keeping count of your crimes?”

“No.” He gulps against the steely pressure. “How they happened. The stories.”

The barrel jolts under his chin. Rey shakes her head at him, humming in her throat. It’s a terrible sound, broken and angry. “No. _No_. You don’t get to—you don’t get to _forget_ —what you did—to them—all of them—”

“I killed one man, and I haven’t forgotten. _Ever_. Sometimes I can’t sleep for remembering—”

“No! You’ve killed _hundreds_ —” The shotgun lurches.

“No. None of those crimes are real. My—the mayor may've printed and posted them in the street but they’re false, they’re lies, I never—”

“That’s not true. You’re guilty—”

“Yes,” he whispers, an ache in his chest. “But not of this.”

“Why should I believe that? I don’t. _I don’t believe it._ You’re Kylo Ren, and you killed them and you’re guilty and now I’m going to—” Rey’s hands shake in tandem with her head now, trembling with fury, words stammering over her tongue.

“Please…” Ren says, and finally he lowers his eyes in this admission while her finger tightens on the trigger. “I had no one else to be.”

“ _What?_ ”

“They cast me out. My family. Turned on me. Saw these posters. _Made_ them. And if they didn’t want me as I was, then I’d be the man everyone already saw, because _what did it matter?_ ” He’s hardly aware of having raised his voice, shouting over the years, but his last words are a bellow. They vibrate along the shotgun’s muzzle. “It didn’t matter—nothing I did mattered—so I made their crimes _mine_ , I told my tales and people liked me better for them— _respected_ me for them—and I’m not like you, Rey, I don’t—I can’t—but—”

“No.”

The shotgun twitches an inch to the right of his jaw. Gaze locked with Ren's, Rey depresses her trigger. He feels rather than hears the shell’s explosion beside his head. _Boom_. The blast deafens and half-blinds him, acrid smoke foul in his nostrils, ears ringing, hair singed from the barrel’s flaming heat. Through streaming eyes, he sees Rey’s lips move with excruciating languor. They frame words that he understands deep in his bones, in the cavity of his chest.

 _You’re right. You’re nothing like me_.

Then his ears pop and she’s screaming, the sound dim and harsh. “Because you had a _choice_! You didn’t have to be this way! They didn’t leave you— _you left them!_ ”

“I _didn’t_ have a choice!” he roars through the dull pulse of his heartbeat in his skull. “If I’d stayed, they would’ve killed me!”

“What, for twenty-five dollars?” Rey scoffs, jabbing her barrel into his chest again. It chars his shirt. The sharp sting clears his head another notch so that her words come louder now, brittle against his eardrums. “Who would even bother? But don't you know, I might do the job from pure good-heartedness. _Dead or alive_ , it says.”

Ren just watches her through smoke-dripping eyes, waiting for her choice between the two.

He wouldn’t have believed his story, either. Let alone after his lies. _His name, the gunshot wound._ It’s the truth, though. Or as near as he can tell it. He’s stoked the rumors himself until people will swear to his false history, that they were there and saw it all. The massacres, the robberies, the cruelty. _Kylo Ren_. He’s a goddamn legend. Everyone wants to believe in him and what he's done to minimize their own sins in comparison. He's a folktale, a caution and a fireside thrill; he’s seen to that.

He’d tear it all down for a chance that Rey might believe him. That it’s all a lie.

But he’s done his work too well—and what are his scribblings on the wanted poster, anyway? Not proof. Just a boy telling himself stories in the dark. Stories of the man called Kylo Ren: strong and cunning and fearless. Feared enough that he’s respected. And safe.

For a while.

“Dead or alive?” he asks Rey when she continues silent, struggling against a childish sob edging into his throat, struggling also for calm. Kylo Ren is calm, even clever with his last words. Leaving something pithy to remember, cocking a grin while the bullet strikes true. Matthew would probably plead. And Ben? _Ben_. No one wants Ben.

No one ever listens.

At least he can die with dignity, if that’s Rey’s choice. He wouldn’t blame her for pulling her trigger again. Not really. It’s the way Kylo Ren should die. No outlaw fades away peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by tearful family.

 _Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t_.

His father’s words, laughing.

“If I take you into Sweet Springs,” Rey says without answering his crucial question, almost musing, “I’ll have twenty-five dollars in the bank. For repairs on the ranch and such. That’s not a lot, but it’s something. And I could use the money. It isn't a simple thing, living out here on my own—even if it’s better than being in town. Boughten goods from time to time make life easier. So why shouldn’t I collect? The money, and gratitude from the mayor. Gratitude could get me a little of what I really want.”

“Yes, she’d be grateful.” In his bravado, Kylo Ren manages to spit.

As though in momentary confusion, Rey’s eyebrows furrow over her nose. But then she jerks her head. “If I’m to stop the railroad’s damage, I need the mayor to see me favorably. Or at least to listen to reason. _My_ reason. So I’m going to repeat myself one last time, Kylo Ren: why shouldn’t I shoot you right now?”

Words slip past his tongue before he can stop them. He’s talking on an instinct rooted up from deep inside himself that he’s tried to stamp out—and failed like he always fails, to suppress and forget.

 _Oh Ben, you_ are _your father’s son_.

“Because you don’t want to."

Rey’s lips part in shock and aversion. So astonished, so revolted that she can’t even speak. Her finger clicks back on the shotgun’s trigger, but she hasn’t pumped its action again since firing a slug beside Ren’s ear. Nothing happens. Then—

“ _I don’t want to?_ ” she growls, clicking away as though blasting Ren to smithereens in her mind. Shattering gray matter and bone in a crimson plume across her shanty's porch. “I don’t want to?! Don’t you tell what I do or don’t want, Kylo Ren, or Matthew, or whoever the hell you really are!”

“Then why haven’t you shot me yet?” His mouth keeps going of its own accord. He shudders against his glibness. “If you were going to shoot me, wouldn’t you have already done it? You’d have done it as soon as you rode back, wouldn’t you? Just swung up your barrel and pulled the trigger. _Finished_. So you want something else. Do you even know what that is?”

“I know what I want.” Her voice pitches high, tighter than a fiddle’s string, overstretched, liable to snap, whipping loose and eviscerating the first object it encounters. Again, her eyes glitter. Steel and coal embers. “I want my family to come back, you bastard. I want what was taken from me. What men like you took from me. I want Rachel Ridley back, and she’s dead!” Her finger still flutters on the shotgun’s trigger, underscoring every hard-flung word with an imaginary slug.

“Rachel Ridley,” Ren echoes. One pump of the action, an ingrained response to her impotent trigger, and—“Who was she?”

Rey snorts. “Who do you think?”

“I don’t know, Rey,” he says her name, as though he can call her back to him. “That’s why I’m asking. I’m asking you to explain, even though you won’t let me explain myself to you.”

She ignores the second half of his remark. She doesn’t believe him, and she’s made that clear. “ _I’m_ Rachel Ridley.”

Oh.

 _Rachel_. _Rey_. Ren’s a fool for not making the connection. He’d even once thought that _Rey_ was an odd name. But, well, he’s under a bit of stress, isn’t he?

 _Rey_. _Kylo Ren_.

Disguises that've become who they are, whether they like it or not.

“Rachel…”

“ _Don’t_ call me that.”

“I thought you wanted—”

“It’s not up to you, Ren. It’s my choice. _Mine_.”

“Couldn’t you just start calling yourself—”

“Could _you_?” she snaps. When he doesn’t answer her, she curls back her lips in a parody of a smile. Her gums are bloody. “No. You’re Kylo Ren, and you’re guilty.”

 _I didn’t mean to kill him_. A shot glass shattering—

“Guilty enough,” he answers her. And then, that stupid bravado: “So do it, Rey.”

At last, she pumps the shotgun’s action after her impotent trigger clicking. Widens her stance to take the stock’s jarring recoil through her shoulder. Tucks the barrel beneath Ren’s chin once more, where it fits so neatly into the hollow under his jaw. He closes his eyes, exhaling against the metal.

“Show me what else you have in the saddlebags.”

His eyes flick open.

Rey’s mouth is twisting. A thin, greasy sheen slicks the shotgun’s stock. Sweat from her palms. She’s frowning so hard that her cracked lips' corners nearly touch her jawline, her mouth’s curve inverted into a brutal arc. She keeps the barrel beneath Ren’s chin—steady, steely, her grip betraying none of the tortured muscle movements flitting over her face—but she doesn’t fire. She chews her tongue in her cheek.

And he realizes: she’s stalling.

Because he’s right. She doesn’t want to shoot him. Well, she does—but she doesn’t want to kill him. And for some reason, she doesn’t want to drag him back to Sweet Springs lashed to her stirrup, either.

He can’t help but be grateful. Yet—

“Why?”

“It’s not corpse robbing if I take what I want while you’re still alive.” Still the pretense, answering a different question than the one he’s really asked. But Rey's had her chance to blast him to high heaven or down to hell, and she hasn’t taken it.

He has to wonder: how many times has she not taken a shot she knew she could make? With all the advantages of putting a bullet through his head, she still hasn’t done it.

_Her hands and her knife. The river. Her shoulder's curve appearing above the bank as she shrugs off her shirtwaist behind a stand of dancing poplar trees. That sliver of nakedness._

“Why don’t you look through the satchels?” he suggests.

Rey considers this, gnawing at her mouth's fiercely tucked corner. Then she tilts her head for him to step sideways along the porch. She keeps her shotgun centered on his chest, as though there’s a cable fastened between the barrel and his breastbone. For all her sweating palms, her hands remain firm on the stock. Rey hooks an ankle through Ren's saddlebag straps. She tugs, upending his leather satchel off the porch so that its contents spill higgledy-piggledy into the soft, heavy grass.

It’s an unimpressive collection.

Bedroll, neckerchief, canteen. A cardboard box rattling with rounds for Ren’s Winchester repeating rifle, lost somewhere on the hillside ridge above Rey’s pasturelands. Lost during that fateful descent toward Sweet Springs in the dark. If he’d only held his crew on the ridgeline until a mist-shrouded sunrise, curbing their impatience with a savage look as he’s done before, reminding them of who he is—a snarling mouth and malignant eyes from the face on his poster—then hiding out in the valley until the next nightfall before approaching the town…

Many things would’ve been different.

Rey makes a noise of disgust when her boot turns over his bedroll, releasing a musky scent of old sweat and unwashed flannel. Her ungentle nudge also shakes loose an intricately carved box wrapped within the bedroll’s center, hidden from casual sight and protected against the damages that hard riding and hard living wreak upon beautiful things. She frowns.

“What is it?” A slight tremor in her knees betrays her instinctive desire to kneel and explore this little mystery, trace the lid with its flowers and knotted labyrinths worked in excruciating and exquisite detail. But her eyes snap up even before the tremor passes, defying him and her own curiosity.

Yet Rey doesn’t retract her question.

“Open it,” Ren tells her.

Suspicion brightens in her narrowed eyes. Rey hitches the shotgun higher onto her shoulder from where it’s slipped down nearly to the crook of her elbow. “Why?”

“Because you want to know what’s inside.”

“You’re going to let me?”

There’s not really a questioning of _letting_ Rey do anything. Not when she has a shotgun trained on the vulnerable cavity between his ribs, finger on the trigger. But Ren says, “Yes.”

“Huh,” she snorts. Not missing a trick—though what trick is she expecting? For him to charge her and that ugly shotgun with flailing fists on his barely healed leg?—she toes off her left boot and extends a dirty, dextrous foot. She prods open the box’s filigree clasp. Ren winces. Rey snorts again at his niceness. She gives another nudge from her toes. The carven lid falls open on the grass with a soundless thud, jostling its contents.

A cylinder filled with dark, viscous liquid bounces loose from its depression in an emerald silk lining and rolls toward Ren on the porch steps.

Rey’s breath catches. She shies back, one hand lifting off the shotgun in a visceral reaction to shield her face.

“Nitroglycerin is transparent like water,” Ren corrects her fear. He stoops down and plucks up the narrow little bottle. “This is ink.”

“How was I supposed to know that?” Rey levels her shotgun again, scowling. And curious. “It could’ve been a ploy to incapacitate me.”

“It could’ve,” he agrees, because what’s the use in a denial? In the truth?

_He doesn’t want to hurt her._

Least of all with a glass of explosive nitroglycerin. Even the thought causes something in his chest to cringe, tucking itself small with shame and fear. Ren cradles the ink jar in his palms, assuring himself that it’s the same vial he packed away last time—a miracle it didn’t shatter during his leg-breaking descent down the ridge—while he watches Rey investigate the box’s other contents.

Delicate papers, some more fragile than moth wings, some thick as glove leather, all bound flat with a tasseled cord. A mat of tightly rolled cowhide, bristles scraped smooth for an even writing surface. A shallow dish for diluting the vial’s vivid ink by mixing it with pure spring water—if there’s any left to bottle. A teak-handled, steel-nibbed calligraphy pen. Two watercolor brushes, the larger with a soft, blunt tip to shade mountains and rivers, the smaller nearly as keen as a knife’s edge for articulating even the thinnest cacti spines.

Rey stares down at these items for a long, perplexed moment. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a calligraphy case.”

“I know that,” she fires back, as she always does when she’s defensive. Ren’s not sure whether she’s lying or if she’s responding to a different answer than the one he’s given. She might not know what calligraphy is—Rey, with her chores and calluses from branding irons and pitchforks, not a single book on her shelves—but that’s not what has confused her. Ren knows it.

“Why do you have this?” she asks at the same instant that he says, “You’re wondering why I have this.”

“Why were you hiding it?” she rallies. "Even in your saddlebags."

“How do you know I was hiding it? I could’ve been keeping it safe from damage in my bedroll.”

“But you weren’t. This box, these papers and brushes—they aren’t something Kylo Ren should have. Something so beautiful.”

Before he can snap back with an appropriately caustic retort— _Oh, really?_ doesn’t quite seem to cut it—Rey continues in a very different tone, her change so sudden that he feels it like whiplash within his skull,

“It’s something Matthew would like.” She nudges the precious box closed, protecting its papers from a gusting breeze chattering down the mountainsides as afternoon closes to evening. Her grimy toes are almost gentle on the clasp.

A shocked moment while he processes Rey's extraordinary statement, his head reeling. _She’s thinking about Matthew._ Then Ren expels a harsh bark of laughter, because it’s the only thing he can do that doesn’t make him look like a stammering fool. “Matthew? That useless cunt—”

“Was a decent man,” Rey cuts across him. “Perhaps not a good one. But decent. At least, he could’ve been, if he hadn’t been your tall tale. Like everything else about you. _Kylo Ren_.” A tiny cough clears her throat. Her shotgun returns to her shoulder. “I almost didn’t mind having him around. But _you_. You don’t have permission to be here. And you know what happens to trespassers.”

 _Crackle, boom_. Wolves invading Rey’s pastures.

 _Dead_.

“Get up,” she tells him. Her voice is harsh again as abruptly as her touch had been gentle on his calligraphy box. “It was time for Matthew to leave, after the explosion this morning. But if _you_ don’t, I will shoot you.” No emphasis on this last promise.

Fact.

Ren stands, eyeing the shotgun’s barrel.

“Tack up the mare.” Rey nods her chin toward the broken-down chestnut that followed Little Bee home from Sweet Springs. “Feed her and treat her well. If I hear tell that you’ve abused her, I will come after you and end you like a colicky steer.”

He doesn’t doubt her.

Ren manages to walk to the mare unaided on his splinted leg, crutches slung as insurance over his arm. Rey follows. She tosses his satchels over the horse’s bony withers. “I need a saddle,” he says.

Rey glances at him from where she’s tightening his saddlebags’ fastenings, one hand slipped inside a satchel and her mouth surly.

“Your other horse’s tack is in the barn. I wasn’t going to waste it. And I’ll give you a hackamore.” A slash from the rancher’s knife stuck through her belt slices a length off her lasso hanging from Little Bee’s saddlehorn. Using one hand and her teeth, shotgun crooked in her arm, she loops and knots the cord into a halter and ties off its end into a set of makeshift reins. No bit, hardly any leverage. She strides into the stable and returns with Ren's previous mount’s saddle. Her gaze is suspicious as she scans him for treachery.

Ren’s done nothing during her absence. He should be grateful that she’s given him this much. That she hasn’t shot him, that she’s even made him a hackamore instead.

But Rey’s little kindness just wakes a sour taste over his tongue and in his gut. Because she’s not really doing any of this for him.

_Goddamn Matthew._

Rey permits him to mount up from the shanty’s porch steps, sparing his leg one last time. Then she smacks the mare’s chestnut flanks. The animal lurches forward into a startled trot. Ren’s teeth rattle. Tasting blood where he’s bitten his cheek, he has to grab his crutches to stop them slipping off the saddlehorn from the mare’s jolting strides—Millie seems a gaited marvel in comparison. By the time he’s collected his belongings and settled into a parody of ordinary riding posture with one boot through its stirrup and the hackamore reins in hand, he’s descended out of sight from the shanty. Too far away to look back.

Which he wouldn’t do, anyhow.

Instead, he imagines Rey standing on her porch, watching him leave. Shotgun drooping at her side, eyes narrowed against a wash of darkness stealing across the valley, devouring him as he rides down through the pastures, fading first into a smudge of gray, then a barely discernible hint of movement. And then nothing. He imagines her staring long after there’s any hope of still picking out his figure from the lavender gloom, her mouth and scowling eyebrows softening, a hint of a tremble beginning in her lips. He imagines her hoping. Not regretting—even Kylo Ren wouldn’t take such liberties. But wishing that things could’ve been other than they are.

Rey alone on her porch. Lonely on her porch.

And him riding away from her with his face turned toward the night, the chestnut picking up a lope, obedient to a fault in her hackamore when she could’ve so easily thrown him with a buck or a sideways shy. If she’d only balked, or refused to obey the instructions from Ren's leg and hands…

Kylo Ren riding away from Rey’s ranch without any intention of coming back again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, our dramatic darlings! *sobs* 
> 
> And...I'll be on a camping trip next weekend, so no Chapter 9 on Sunday. I'm sorry to leave you dangling on this depressing note...
> 
> (But not very sorry. *evil chuckle*)
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge, huge thank you to my darling JaneEyre1847 for teaching me about calligraphy in Chapter 8! I've updated the section on Ren's case to reflect my new knowledge--thank you so much, lovely!
> 
> And thevagabondthoughts made an absolutely gorgeous [series of covers](https://thevagabondthoughts.tumblr.com/post/177237675597/he-imagines-rey-standing-on-her-porch-watching) for this fic--I'm still swooning. :) Thank you, thank you!

The instant that Kylo Ren disappears down a swelling hill into the pasturelands, tilting at windmills with his crutches, the mare flatulent under his weight, Rey takes Little Bee to the barn. She untacks him and rubs him down. It takes a long time. Picking his hooves clean of the filth in Sweet Springs’ streets—dog shit and rotted apples. Currying sweat marks from the mustang’s withers, belly, and chest from where Rey's breast collar and girth have slicked his hide with dark, warm patches. Brushing him dry again with a stiff-bristled brush over his ribs and flanks, a soft cloth wiping his muzzle and eyes; much softer than the burlap with which Rey scrubs her own face at the washbasin. Plucking burrs from his particolored tail—not the luxurious growth of a well-fatted quarter horse, but coarse as bracken and good for killing flies with a single hard flick. She brushes him again once her elbow grease has grubbed away the worst dirt and tangles. Again. And again, until his coat gleams cream and almost a ruddy orange in the stable’s dim light.

Her shoulders ache and muscles in her arms sing. _Good_. It’s good.

Rey mucks out the stalls, pitches in fresh bedding for her stock, then fills their mangers with sweet-smelling alfalfa. The hay tickles her nose. She can’t help crying when she sneezes; that’s how her body endures the capricious sensations dancing up her nostrils. So she’s not surprised to find a dribble of tears on her cheeks as she sneezes over and over, heaving up another forkful of alfalfa, exposing the storage stall’s corner where bales are disturbed from their twine bindings, long stems scattered in a disheveled carpet across the floor. She sees now that he must’ve hidden his incriminating saddlebags within the mess. Sweet lord, how could she have forgotten about those satchels? But she had, what with her work and his wasp strings, the lathered burlap...and the explosion. Other things. Things that had seemed so important at the time.

She swipes a cuff beneath her itching nose. _Ugh_ , she hates alfalfa!

A vicious dig of her pitchfork’s tines into the hay bales flings chaff across Millie’s overflowing manger. Another dig, and—

“ _Ouch!_ ”

Every muscle in Rey’s body locks.

Millie sometimes brays with a noise sounding so much like human laughter that it’s startled Rey half out of her skin on tired mornings. Little Bee’s cheerful nickers when she slips him a handful of grain in gratitude for a tough task well done—these are words to Rey. Not human words, yet it’s an affectionate conversation between them just the same. The sort of conversation she’d never have with another person.

But neither of the noises that Millie and Little Bee make could ever be mistaken for “ouch.”

Rey’s immediate instinct is to shove her pitchfork into the alfalfa again, pinning down whatever has made this unfamiliar sound, holding it in place until she has a breath to think, to analyze. To plan what to do next. How she’ll react.

Whether she’s prepared to kill, if need be. Her shotgun’s near to hand in her saddle holster.

But _ouch_ is a human noise. And skewering a human on her tines would be difficult to chalk up to accident.

Even a human hiding within her hay bales.

So instead, Rey hefts her pitchfork like a pike. She aims its tines in a preemptive rebuttal to counterattacks and demands, “Who’s there?”

Silence.

She waits. It’s the silence of fear-held breath. A fretful lack of sound. The silence of trying not to move when nerves and adrenaline scream for desperate flight or attack. It’s the stillness of hoping she’ll go away. Praying she’ll overlook that betraying noise of pain.

Rey does not go away.

“I heard you,” she says, pitching her tone low and steady when she’s teetering on the edge of a full-blown shriek, her own anxiety thundering through her muscles, making her lightheaded. _Too much, this is just too much right now_. “I know you’re there. If you don’t answer me and show yourself, I’ll thrust these tines straight through—”

“Fine. _Fine!_ ” a muffled voice cuts in hastily. “Just don’t...because that _hurt_.”

A man’s voice.

Alfalfa shuffles and slides. A pair of hands emerge from deep within the chaff, brushing scattered stems off a buried torso. Two torsos. Two figures dressed in worn, faded clothing hanging off fear-hunched shoulders, faces grimy with sweat and soot. Two pairs of eyes, dark and wary. One figure grips the other’s arm, either for comfort or in restraint. They blink at Rey and she stares straight back, pitchfork at the ready but thoroughly nonplussed.

 _What in the sweet lord’s name_ …

One of the figures is pale and moon-faced, black hair pulled into a queue. The other is shadow-dark, broad-shouldered beneath a tattered tunic, gripping the first figure’s shoulder with blunt, short-nailed fingers.

They’re obviously not lovers interrupted in a moment of passion. Rolling in the hay, as it were.

They’re equally obviously not from Sweet Springs.

It takes only a moment for Rey to place them as being from the railroad line. It’s the only logical way to explain these extraordinary figures in her alfalfa bales.

“Please,” the pale one says to her open-mouthed bafflement. “Please don’t give us away.”

 _Running_ away _from the railroad line_ , Rey amends to herself. But...

“Who are you?” she asks them—not hostile, but also not lowering her pitchfork. Exhausted, dirty, and beaten down, they don’t look dangerous. But neither do many things that sting and bite. And she’s had enough surprises to last a year. If there’s a cavalry galloping along to her ranch to collect these runaways, she’s going to want to know about it before lawmen show up and accuse her of harboring fugitives.

 _Other_ fugitives.

Wouldn’t it be something to have ordinary neighbors come calling, with jams or carded wool or gossip to share? Asking for a loan of eggs, or butter, or just a dipper of water in the noonday heat?

She’s never wanted such neighbors.

But she likes intruders even less. Because: what trouble will they bring to her shanty’s door, this time? After Kylo Ren…

“I’m Finn,” the dark man says, clearing his throat to catch Rey’s eye. His hand tightens on his companion’s shoulder. _Protective_. “This is Tico. Who’re you?”

Rey shakes her head. At least their ignorance means that they’ve chosen her ranch for a hideout from a disinterested desire to just conceal themselves _somewhere_. No malicious intent. Not like— _no_. She grits her teeth, forcing herself to focus on following her spooling thoughts to their conclusion.

So...they probably came sneaking up through the pastures when she’d gone to Sweet Springs earlier in the day, fleeing the explosion while she’d galloped toward it. Hiding themselves in the barn as Ren paced along the shanty porch. This is almost worse than if they’d intentionally aimed for her homestead, though—bad luck never comes singly.

And she knows these two are bad luck. There’s a hunted look to them that screams _fugitive_. Runaways from working on the railroad line. Oh yes.

But they’re not trying to conceal this fact from her. Caught red-handed, but without excuses or slick explanations. Just watching Rey and her pitchfork to see what she’ll do with the knowledge. That’s...something. They’re not hiding who they are, even when they really should. Perhaps because they already know they can’t in a place like the Sweet Springs valley. Not looking as they do.

“This is my ranch,” Rey tells them now. “My barn. My alfalfa you’re rifling through.” She flicks aside a few stray stems with her pitchfork, uncovering the sole of a badly patched shoe. That sole wouldn’t last ten miles before leaving the wearer barefoot, stumbling over rocks and through thorny, spiny plants that grow low and savage on the surrounding ridges.

“S-sorry, we didn’t mean—”

“We had to get away,” the man called Finn cuts across his companion. “After—”

“The...explosion,” the other one whispers. It’s barely a stammered breath, but Finn chokes off his hard, fast words to squeeze his companion’s shoulder again.

“Nitroglycerin.” Rey drags up her gaze to their faces from that pitiful shoe.

Finn’s eyes narrow. “You know about that? You involved?”

“No. But I heard the noise.”

“So you’re not with the railroad?”

Still careful to avert her eyes from the tattered sole, ignoring a hollowness widening fissures in the pit of her stomach and through her chest, Rey indicates her pitchfork in answer. _Rancher_. _Homesteader_.

“Oh. Good.”

“We aren’t either,” the queue-haired stranger says, words spat out in a stronger voice now and bitter with articulation. _Tico_. “Not anymore.”

“Is anyone coming after you?” Rey asks them. This is the material point. Not the shoe.

Finn shakes his head. “Wouldn’t think so. The overseers think we’re dead.”

“Some didn’t make it away from the explosion,” Tico says, mouth abruptly thinning at the corners. _Shock_ —a brutal whiplash between emotions. Laughing and screaming with the same breath.

“And we ran,” Finn continues.

A lump of old tears in Rey's throat is from the alfalfa. “Why? You could’ve handed over your resignations, or taken your last pay and left—”

Tico snorts, a damp hiccough of a sound. “We weren’t t-there by choice. Not at the end.”

“Careful,” Finn mutters to his companion, whose lip curls. Brushing off his grip with an impatient gesture from sharp, hunched shoulders, Tico stands. The motion sets off a clanking rattle deep within the ruffled hay bales. Grimacing, and as if under some mirroring compulsion, Finn rises with a hand braced on Tico’s arm for balance. Together they step from the alfalfa’s shelter.

They’re shackled.

Finn’s and Tico’s ankles are bound to one another with cuffs and a length of chain. A short tail of broken links chimes from Tico’s right leg, where something has sundered the iron binding. The ends are melted—a shattering, white-hot blast from the nitroglycerin explosion softening and cracking the metal like eggshells. Tico’s trouser leg is blackened with charring. Finn’s left ankle has no dangling links; he must’ve been at the end of the railroad chain gang's line.

_Chained._

Such little circumstances have allowed them to escape with their lives.

“We didn’t all make it.” Eyes filmy with grief, no hint of hiccoughing laughter now, Tico stares down at the broken links. “N-not all of us.”

“But we tried,” Finn says, strengthening his grip on his companion’s arm as though to hold a buckle-kneed Tico upright. To convince himself. “Tico, we tried.”

Rey knows all about trying. The desperation, the guilt.

And chains? Not chains like these, but she knows about shackles, too.

 _Oh, yes_.

She jerks her chin toward her feed barrels. “Sit.”

“Why? What are you going to do?” Finn eyes her pitchfork with a wary sideways glance.

“I’m getting a rasp.” Rey thrusts her tines down into the alfalfa and strides over to a hanging rack of tools on the barn’s far wall. Her fingers skitter over cold metal until she finds a rough-edged file that abrades her knuckles when she scrapes her hand against it. It should be strong enough.

“Why?” Finn repeats. Subtly shifting his stance but betrayed by the clanking metal banding his legs, he edges a protective shoulder in front of Tico’s chest.

“Do you want to keep those?” Rey nods at the thick iron circlets.

“No.”

“But why are you helping us?” Tico exerts pressure on Finn’s arm as if to step before him in turn. Neither of them move from the stall, from the alfalfa and its illusions of safety.

Because Finn and Tico have just come from the railroad; Rey needs information about the line and its plans any way she can get it. Because they’ve seen the nitroglycerin’s damage first-hand. Perhaps how to replicate it.

Because of their worn-out shoes.

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” she tells them.

Finn hitches a half-smile. Tico doesn’t, eyes narrowed. Still, when Rey brandishes her rasp for them to stagger from the stall and seat themselves on the feed barrels, then drops to her heels and edges a strip of burlap sacking between Tico’s ankle and its cuff, they hold still and let her get on with filing against the shackles. Metal shavings glint and splinter. The rasp bucks, jerking in Rey’s grip, then finds its groove. Fortunately for them all—and Rey’s tired shoulders in particular—the shackles are cheaply made things, forged from shoddy scrap litter. Once Rey finds a weakness in the metal, she makes swift progress in sawing through the half-inch cuff, exploiting soldered veins where the iron is already cracked and vulnerable. Tico massages a liberated leg while Rey breaks open the second cuff, then moves to Finn’s irons. When the shackle cracks apart on his right ankle, he rubs at knobby bones where an angry, callused weal reddens the skin above his decrepit shoes.

_Oh, sweet lord..._

Given the calluses and sores beneath their cuffs, Tico and Finn must’ve worn these shackles for weeks. The pain of iron rubbing abrasions against skin would’ve been agonizing in the beginning, before their ankles toughened and no longer bled from a day’s work.

Snagging her lips between her teeth, belly seething, Rey twists away her face before she can be sick. She grips her rasp and scratches its filing edge against her palm. _Focus_.

Because—

“Now what?” Finn asks.

Rey rasps harder until the heel of her hand gleams pink and raw. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t know.

 _Now what, Mama?_ No answer but a wailing wind.

_I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know._

Rasping, rasping, until her breath catches. She lets the file fall, cradling her palm.

“What are you going to do with us?” Tico says into Rey’s silence after the rasp clatters down to stillness on the barn floor.

Rey fists her hand, locking away her pain. Then she looks up at these strangers. Breathes. “Nothing. I’m not going to do anything. I’ll take information on the railroad explosion, if you’ll give it. But that’s all.”

She’s spoken quietly, but Tico shudders at the syllables in  _explosion_ as though they're leather lashes. Shadows dip across exposed clavicles and along the tattered, greasy lines of a sagging linen shirt. Peculiar shadows.

“That’s fair,” Finn says. “But then?”

“Then what?” Frowning at his interruption from a thread of understanding that’s beginning to unspool before her, Rey reluctantly turns aside her gaze from Tico.

“After we tell you what we know. What are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” Rey repeats, her annoyance deepening. She’s already said this and she only needs a single, peaceful moment to see clearly—“You’ll want to go, won’t you?”

Tico’s short laugh is hollow and grim. “Go where?”

“Your families, or friends, or…” Where do people go when they’re not bound by blood and ink to a ranch? The giddy, terrible freedom of it? Unmoored, lost, following the wild wind’s call. Galloping over the horizon and beyond. Anywhere. Nowhere.

Another brutal laugh that verges on a sob. “Everyone I used to know is dead.”

Finn grips Tico’s hand, stilling the trembling fingers in comfort or restraint. “And there’s nothing waiting for me back east. Got away from the South after the Proclamation, came out here to make my own way. The railroad seemed like good money. Too good. But then...”

“So make your way.”

“Not on foot.” Finn jiggles his awful shoes. “Not with the explosion so recent. The overseers’ll be looking for—”

“Someone to blame,” Rey cuts in. “I know. But if you weren’t planning to head back east or further out west, what was your plan?”

“There was no plan.” Tico’s mouth knots. “Just...run. There was a chance, and we took it. Damned for it—”

“No, we did everything we could—”

“It wasn’t enough! She died anyway!” Tico glares at Finn, tears finally leaking through tilted black lashes and over the curves of apple-round cheeks.

“It wasn’t your fault, Tico.”

“ _Yes, it was_. We left her behind. _I_ left her behind, and if I’d just—my own _sister_ —” Tico gasps, tears streaming freely now, turning suddenly to pound fists against Finn’s thighs, his chest, battering him in a frenzy of broken grief that has him grunting at the blows. But Finn endures the beating, letting Tico thrash and scratch him, just breathing while it goes on and on, the insatiable desire to hurt someone else to relieve a strangling, sickening misery inside.

Rey knows this. And she knows it won’t stop, unless...

“What was her name?” She doesn’t approach Tico, but she gentles her voice as she’d gentle her hands over a frightened calf caught in barbed wire.

Another blow to Finn's stomach, and Tico heaves a painful inhale. Then another. “ _Paige_. Her name was Paige.”

“I’m sorry.”

Skinned, grimy knuckles lower from pounding Finn to scrub at Tico’s eyes. Deflated, sagging now. “Why?” The word is muffled. “Why should you be sorry?”

_Because I know what it is to lose everything. How it sets you adrift, except for the anchor of your grief keeping you static, unmoving, desperate and terrified to break free._

Rey doesn’t answer. She doesn’t trust herself to speak.

“But…” Finn cuts through their fraught quiet, rubbing gingerly at a bruise blossoming on his shoulder. “Can we...stay here? At least until they stop looking for us?”

“You said no one was looking for you. That the railroad men think you’re dead.”

“Until they stop looking for culprits,” he clarifies hastily.

“Do you know who did it? Who blew up the line? And how?”

Finn shakes his head. Tico doesn’t.

Nibbling her lip between her teeth while she replaces the rasp and pitchfork from their hooks, Rey considers. Tico...something about Tico is familiar. And there’s also something that talkative Finn’s companion isn’t sharing.

Something about the explosion.

Perhaps she needs a distraction after the sudden silence in her shanty, and perhaps this information is worth it—Rey’s not certain. But she makes a decision with her ordinary quickness.

“I’ll hide you here,” she says to them. “You’ll tell me about the railroad plans, and how to stop them.”

Tico’s lips tighten. Finn smiles with relief and takes Rey’s abraded hand in a bargain.

This time around, she knows better than to bring fugitives into her shanty. Nor does she try to tie either Finn or Tico down. Neither of them want to leave, anyway. Stealing distinctive-looking Millie or Little Bee would only make them conspicuous to lawmen and overseers eager for scapegoats. Instead, Rey offers them horse blankets on a reasonably soft bedding of straw in the storage stall, raking her loosened alfalfa smooth in a corner. She lays out Little Bee’s winter covering as a mattress, with Millie’s turnout rug serving for a quilt. It’s snug enough.

Finn agrees, testing the springy hay and grinning at Tico. “Nice, isn’t it? After sleeping on the ground.”

Tico’s black eyebrows contract over a snub nose. “I could sleep out on the barn floor.”

“Why?”

A very slight rosy color touches Tico’s cheeks through shades of dirt. Shyness, or embarrassment.

And all at once, Rey understands.

 _Well_.

“Stay here,” she tells Finn in a curt voice. “If you try anything funny, the mule will let me know.”

“Why? What—”

“Come with me,” she says to Tico. When Tico hesitates, Rey softens her command with an open palm. “It’s all right.”

 _You’re safe, now_.

Glancing back over a shoulder at bemused Finn, Tico follows Rey from the stable and to her shanty, walking with unsteady knees at the freedom to stride at full length. Rey doesn’t hesitate when leading this stranger over her threshold.

To hell with her earlier cautions.

This is different.

“There’s water for washing, if you’d like,” she points to her ewer and basin. “I don’t have any spare clothes that are...right, though. Besides, you haven’t told him. Have you?”

“It was safer.” Tico stares at the floorboards, hands twisting over and over. Whisper-soft, she mutters spilling words beneath her breath. “I could pass well enough. Paige couldn’t, but at least she had some protection if the others thought she had a brother with her. And with Finn, by the time I knew I could trust him, it was too late.”

“So you don’t mind about the clothes.”

A small smile falls from Tico’s lips. “No. I wouldn’t know what to do with pretty things, anyway.” 

“Me, neither.” Rey’s own smile is rusty. The corners of her mouth seem to creak. But she tries.

She tidies up the shanty while Tico scrubs her face and hands in the washbasin. A furtive glance determines that the girl is too occupied with the first wash she must’ve had in a month to notice Rey’s putting her room to rights and erasing evidence of another fugitive at the same time. Ordering her tins of beans so that all the labels face outward—he always knocked them askew when he grabbed down a can for cooking—straightening the blankets covering her straw-tick (thank the sweet lord, she’d washed lingering bloodstains from setting his leg out of her linens several weeks before), pulling the rocking chair back beside the table. Corrections that neither Finn nor Tico would note, but the objects out of place make Rey skittish and fretful just the same.

For all they know, she’s simply a sloppy housekeeper.

Still, she works while Tico splashes.

The girl emerges from behind Rey’s sackcloth towel a few minutes later, cheeks and forehead bright with scrubbing, fringe damp across her forehead. Without a dirty slick of smoke or soil coating her skin, the gaping hollows beneath her eyes appear stark and blue. She looks utterly exhausted, even while she’s trying to smile her thanks.

“Better?” Rey wishes she had something to do with her hands. But she’s already tidied the shanty, and she doesn’t want to fidget. She’s...not sure how to offer comfort to this woman. She’s not sure about any of this.

The girl nods with a little jerk of her jaw. But the movement seems to dislodge something barely buried within her chest, and tears flood over her eyelashes again in a sudden gush. Her chin quivers. Tico claps her palms over her mouth, eyes wide and sparkling, her keening nearly silent as she sinks down to the floor. She’s sobbing into her hands so hard that her shoulders jolt against the wall's unchinked boards, which tremble and sing around their pegs.

“Sorry, I’m sorry—” she gasps out between her fingers, curling in on herself, rocking with her forehead on her knees as choked, whimpering misery spills from her throat. “I—I—you’re the—only—haven’t—”

“Don’t talk…” Rey’s stiff and awkward, standing in the middle of her shanty’s tiny room. “It’s...it’s all right…?”

Tico shakes her head, muffling another wail. “Not—n-not all right…so nice to me...and I—”

“I’m...sure she was lovely.” Isn’t this how she’s supposed to give comfort? Kind words, but they only seem to make Tico sob in greater desperation. Grief in its first ardent bloom. “Your sister—”

“P-P-P-Paige? Y-yes…” The girl gulps hard, fingers digging into her abraded ankles, controlling herself with a dose of pain; it’s a technique Rey knows well. After a strained hitch in her chest, Tico’s breathing steadies. She raises up a tearstained face. Imprints of her knees mark two red blotches on her forehead. “But I m-meant you.”

“Rey. I’m...Rey.” She offers her name, because Rey doesn’t know how else to respond. She’s not being kind. Not really.

“I’m Rose.”

They stare at each other for a moment. It’s a bargain they’ve just made, no less than shaking hands with Finn. And when the pressure of dark, wet eyes becomes too much, too close, Rey ventures, “ _Rose_. Like a flower. I’ve only seen pictures, but they’re pretty. Aren’t they?”

Rose Tico gives a damp snort. She wipes away lingering tears on her cheeks and chin instead of devolving into agonized keening. “P-Paige was the pretty one.”

_But you’re the one who’s still alive._

Perhaps Rose catches the edge of this thought. She says, dragging a hand beneath her nose like she’s calling herself to task, tidying herself as Rey has tidied the shanty, “And Rey. Rey’s pretty, too. What’s it mean?”

“It...it doesn’t mean anything. Just my name.”

“I like it.” Rose’s smile is watery. But it’s a nice smile.

 _Nice_. It’s a word Rey hasn’t used in a long time.

She’s not sure how to feel about it. Or about this woman who looks at her like _she’s_ nice.

When she isn’t. She really isn’t.

But she lets them stay in her barn. And she fashions bedding for Rose away from Finn, to his confusion and Rose’s gratitude—a pressed hand in the shadows that almost startles Rey into striking the girl with blind, mindless panic at being touched. But she manages to stop herself, to quiet her shrieking nerves and pulsing muscles. She gives a tentative squeeze back.

It feels odd. She doesn’t know what _nice_ feels like.

So:  _odd_.

After the first full day spent hiding in Rey’s stable from overseers who are unlikely ever to come looking for unpaid dead men, Finn announces that he’s bored.

“If I could _do_ something!”

Having just returned from her traplines along river, Rey shrugs and hands him a brace of coveys to skin.

“Oh.” Finn’s clasp is gawky on the knife she supplies. His throat bobs. He stares down at the slender legs and lifeless ears spread limply across his lap.

“Like this,” Rose cuts in after an awkward moment with her voice pitched low—Tico’s voice. She skins a rabbit with more determination than skill, gripping it by the ears rather than the rear paws so that it bucks in her unsteady hold. Has she even done such work before? Perhaps she’s trying to ease Finn’s embarrassment by offering him an example before he tackles the task himself. This way, he’ll at least have some idea of what to do.

Or what not to do.

 _Kind_. Rose is kind.

And so obviously sweet on her companion that Rey has to restrain herself from smacking oblivious Finn upside the head. The way her cheekbones glow and her eyes fall when he touches her in casual thanks, or when his elbow grazes her ribcage as he reaches for a covey. The way she brushes off any praise he offers with a sarcastic comment and a tuck to her mouth, as though she’s trying not to smile too widely and has to shield her delight. The way she’s protective when he’s distracted, keeping watch over him when he doesn’t even know it. The way she swoops in with a comment or a question if he’s about to lop off a finger.

Oh yes. She might even love him. _Strange_. Over the next several days, Rey watches Rose mourn her sister and love this clumsy man with his bright smile and his oafish hands while she gets on with her own chores. She has to do a good portion of her mending on Little Bee’s harness leathers over again—they’re a tangled, ill-patched mess when she’s finished with them.

She’s concentrated so fiercely, but…

She’s wrecked her work, and forgotten to ask about the railroad’s weaknesses.

 _Soon_. She’ll ask soon. When Finn and Rose trust her enough to tell the truth. Finn might already. A simple man. But Rose...Rose is cleverer. Her silences when he speaks his ignorance give more away than they conceal. Yes, she probably knows much more about the line’s workings than her companion, even if she lets him think otherwise.

After all, he still hasn’t cottoned on that she’s a woman and in love with him.

Why Finn? He laughs easily, but he’s useless at his work.

To whit: Rey’s pelts are fit only for her rubbish heap when he’s finished hacking up the coveys. Mangled and bloody. Nothing she can use for bartering with the tanner after roasting or smoking the meat. Rose praises his work from where she’s cleaning off bits of skin and fur still stuck to the rabbits' disfigured flesh. She smiles at him as though he’s the morning’s first sun. He just grunts his dissatisfaction.

“Made a mess.”

A sharp look from Rose stops Rey confirming this.

Why should she bother with delicacy for this man’s feelings? He probably wouldn’t care if she gave him the hard truth about what a wreck he’s made. But hearing rough words spoken to Finn would hurt Rose—love is like that, Rey supposes.

Rose, who’s been hurt enough already.

And Rey can be gentle with this girl as so few have been gentle with her. After all, she has time.

No counting down the days until a broken bone heals.

No counting down the nights until she can sleep again, too aware of steady breathing in the shanty’s darkness to rest.

No capable hands skinning pelts as easily as peeling apples. Handing her the cattle brand’s cool end, rather than shoving the flaming iron so near her face that she leaps back and loses her tie-down on a calf she’s roped.

 _Sorry, I didn’t know_ — _won’t happen again_ —

No Matthew.

No Kylo Ren.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rose didn't get any play time in _Sun, Sand, and Stone_ , so I'm hoping to rectify that in this fic! Plus, the more I write her, the more I love her. Rose Tico, you are my fierce sunshine!
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	10. Chapter 10

It would be a statement to ride through the night. A gesture worthy of Kylo Ren. But he's dog-tired, his leg’s aching, and who’s he trying to impress with theatrics like that anyhow? There’s no one here to see. It’s something his father would’ve done...but Ren doesn’t urge the chestnut mare to climb from Sweet Springs' fields and into craggy, pine-studded mountain passes, eyes peeled for a flicker of firelight, listening for the sound of a harmonica’s muffled wail. Or for Frank’s snoring. Louder than John’s instrument, sometimes.

He wants to keep riding because stillness will be a stiffening torture for his sore hip and knee, even more painful than continuing on with the mare’s five-beat gait jarring his pelvis. Sleeping’s worse yet.

But he needs to rest. His mount needs to rest. He wouldn’t put it past Rey to track him down and slug him if he doesn’t treat this mare to the very best of everything. Lush, honeyed clover for grazing—or the least prickly patch of mountain scrub growing low on the slopes. A good rubdown before Ren bathes his face in one of the flatland rivers’ silty tributaries winding through red-earthed clefts in the hills.

The mare nuzzles him for his pains. Loosening her girth, Ren just groans.

“Want to show thanks? Lose the fifth leg,” he mutters, gingerly massaging bruised, aching flesh on the insides of his thighs.

She shakes her short, scruffy mane in an equine shrug and falls to browsing.

Ren groans again.

He’s reined up in a fissure between the mountains’ vermillion-veined foothills. Here he can light a hidden fire and even sleep an hour at a time before waking to scan his surroundings, eyes sharpened for danger through the darkness. It should feel like a luxury, this camp. But he’s so tired, and his hands are clumsy on the tinder he scrounges. He barely manages to set sparks to a few dry twigs, then collapses back onto his bedroll. Rustles in the night beyond his twisting little blue-hearted fire are just the mare foraging for the best fodder she must’ve had in months, given the state of her ribs. She nickers and snorts, rooting for the soft, sweet bulbs of grasses’ roots and chaparral’s piquant relish with a zest that he finds indecent.

“I’m selling you on as soon as I find a better mount,” he tells the mare, crawling into his musty blankets with a mumbled curse for his leg. “It’s not like she’ll know.”

Another snort.

“I’ll be long gone by the time she learns about it. So shut up and let me sleep.”

Thumping hooves wander over to the fireside. Flames reflect in a pair of limpid brown eyes.

“Fine, so I won’t sell you back to the tanner. Happy?”

A stamp.

He’s about to retort—when Ren realizes that he’s having a complete conversation with a horse. Which is totally idiotic. Look what she’s done to him, always talking with her mustang and mule! As though they’ll answer her back. Like they’re even capable of thinking beyond _eat, shit, mate_. Muttering to himself and ignoring the chestnut’s reproachful gaze, easing his left leg into a slightly more comfortable position, Ren rolls over and closes his eyes. _Sleep_. He needs to sleep.

The mare’s silence is piqued. Or at least, she goes back to cropping grass and hillside thistles with snapping teeth.

Ren ignores her. _Just a horse_.

But it’s the mare who hears the wolves. Their howling begins late in the night when a sickle moon anchors at the sky’s precise midpoint above the valley. Ren hunches deeper into his bedroll at first, the mournful sounds echoing like argent threads through a tapestry that his weary mind weaves in unguarded moments on sleep's glimmering edge—images, sounds, glimpses of memory. Blending with them, a natural ache in his chest. But then a whiskered muzzle inveigles into his bedroll and against the crook of Ren’s neck. It blows anxious whuffles through his ear. He tries to push the intrusion away with a limp hand. The mare knocks him hard across the jaw with her cheekbone.

“The hell—” he grunts, blinking and rubbing his chin. That’s when he wakes fully to realize: they’re not alone in the howling darkness.

And he doesn’t have a rifle.

“Damn it, damn it…” Cursing, Ren grabs his crutches and lurches out of his blankets. These canes are sturdy things, but they won’t be much use against hunting buffalo wolves. The pack is likely too wary to return to Rey’s pastures just yet; wolves are intelligent beasts, and they’ll remember their slaughter at her hands.

But a solitary man and horse are easy prey.

“Can you kneel?” Ren asks the mare, cinching her girth and slinging his satchels over the saddlehorn. He scuffs out their fire—once spotted by keen canine eyes, it’ll attract the predators like a beacon.

Another equine shrug. The chestnut’s ears swivel to where the pack is yelping and assembling for a hunt further down the valley. Her eyes roll and gleam white in the fire's dying embers. The wolves are still a good mile away from Ren and the mare, their yapping outcry carrying through the lowlands in reverberating echoes; the pack seems much closer than it is. But wolves cover distance quickly once they catch a target’s sight or scent. Even a galloping horse would be hard-pressed to outrun a hunting pack.

So they can’t become a mark.

Let these wolves take down the valley’s fatted deer or fish in the rivers. If they’re hungry, there’s food to be had in plenty. But plump, complacent does and sluggish steelhead aren’t much of a challenge for a cunning pack accustomed to the thrill of hunting big game. _Stampeding buffalo, rotting on the plains now._ What’s the pleasure in stalking prey that doesn’t fight back?

There’s no time to coax this mare into a compliant kneel. Ren mounts up with a push from his crutches bracing his weak leg. Overcompensating for atrophied calf muscles with a massive thrust in his shoulders, he nearly slides off the mare’s far side. Grunting, she staggers at his awkward weight. His left leg protests with a trickling pain working its way up from the healing bones, settling in his hip.

Wolves' jaws will crack his leg easily as snapping a twig, greedy for nutrient-rich marrow within the bones. If miserable spasms from his ankle to his ribcage are the price to pay for avoiding that fate, he’ll bear them with a grim smile.

Ren settles his crutches within reach over the saddlehorn, then slides back his heel and nudges the mare’s side. She lurches forward into a canter, picking up her hooves with an urgent goodwill that does nothing for her gait. At least she’s fleet enough and doesn’t stumble on her thrashing legs, covering ground across the valley floor with a desperate swiftness as they first canter, then gallop north.

They might make it clear of the pack if they keep to this pace. If they can get away unseen.

 _But no._ Never such luck for Kylo Ren.

A keening howl drifts up into the sky, echoing against distant stars glittering with a cruel, clear light. There’s a new note in the wailing noise—a summons and an instruction, the pitch trembling high with excitement.

_Prey. Running. Chase._

They've been galloping for less than a quarter mile.

“ _Fuck_ me,” Ren grimaces. They have to get out of the lowlands; they’ll never outrun this pack on the flat. They need to climb into the mountain ridges above the valley—make it difficult for the wolves to head them off or surround them. Use the terrain as a bulwark against a straight attack, hinder a frontal assault with the pack’s full strength. They need to force the wolves to come against them singly.

Craning his neck, Ren looks up, and up, and up to the summit peaks. His leg makes a painful, sympathetic pulse.

But it’s not as though he has much choice.

A wallop from his heels sends the mare across the last flat acres of pastureland. They gallop directly at a rising hillside that stretches up to the looming, mountainous ridgeline circling Sweet Springs' valley. The chestnut runs willingly, straight and true, and she’s either going to send them crashing headlong into the slope, or—

Elbows and knees bracing his crutches and saddlebags, hands fisted in her mane, Ren manages to keep his seat when the mare’s haunches sink low and she charges against the hillside. A deceptively powerful thrust from stringy muscles in her hindquarters launches them up. There's a weightless moment while his stomach lurches into his throat, and then she lands with a skid of pebbled earth and bracken. She’s galloping still, sheer force of will and the fearsome howling behind them keeping her careening upward along the rugged incline, battling treacherous, sucking gravity. But residual momentum can’t keep her moving forward forever; after several impossible, incredible strides, her knees buckle, her shoulders strain, and—

“Come on, come on,” Ren urges the mare through gritted teeth, shifting his weight over her withers to balance them both. “Just a little further to that ledge...can rest there...”

A twitching ear shows that she’s listening, even while she fights her way with laboring steps.

“Good girl,” he pants. “Good girl.”

Whether from this faint praise or because the slope levels out slightly from its avalanche-shorn sheerness at the valley floor, the mare wheezes deep in her chest, then staggers forward to bring them onto ground just level enough that she can stand quietly without tumbling back down the hillside. Ren eases his weight off her neck. Breathing hard and soaked with sweat, they’ve nevertheless surmounted the first hurdle toward safety—leaping out of immediate range from the scenting buffalo wolves. The slope below them is now too unstable to support the heavy, thick-bodied predators if they attempt an uphill attack; the mare's hooves have churned it into little more sliding gravel. The earth will give way under pursuing padding paws, sending the wolves pitching back onto the valley floor, battered and bruised with stinging pellets of stone.

“Good,” Ren repeats, unfisting a hand from the mare’s mane to stroke a tentative palm along her neck.

She makes a whuffling noise through reddened, flaring nostrils. A nod of her head raises her muzzle out of the dirt.

Ren pats her again. Her ears come an inch or two higher. “That was good work,” he says, steadying his own breathing while he smoothes sweat-matted, wiry hairs under her mane. “Brave work.”

Perhaps his words motivate the mare to mount a second attempt against the hillside, carrying them another hundred feet above the valley floor with scrabbling hooves and sagging knees. Or perhaps it’s the excited whining and glinting yellow eyes in the grassland below; the wolves have caught up with them. Of course they have. Ren’s lips curl over his teeth. He snarls back at the predators. Adrenaline thunders through his muscles.

When pebbles skitter at the hillside’s base in the pack’s first cautious attempt at tackling the slope, the mare leaps higher with hardly any prodding under Ren’s heels. Halfway to the ridge, forging her own desperate path. The footing is treacherous, threatening to skid out from under her hooves. The dirt barely holds together around a few tangled chaparral roots. But there’s safety in its treachery: when the pack’s alpha female lunges up the pitch, tongue bloody in the moonlight, the earth gives way beneath her paws. She shrieks, yelping as she’s swept back down the hillside in a shower of rocks and silt.

 _Good_. But they can’t stop. Not yet.

“Again?” Ren asks the mare. She twitches her ears and assaults the slope with another thrashing leap, kicking detritus down onto the pack in a painful pebbled rain. The wolves skitter away from her barrage, whining and growling.

And so, foot by foot, heaving for breath, they climb the ridge. Several times the mare sinks to her knees, groaning. On the third time, she shivers with exhaustion under Ren’s hand and doesn’t rise again. The wolves howl at her stillness. Burgeoning triumph in the calls. _Feast_.

 _No_.

Ren dismounts, digging his heels into the shifting soil, bracing himself with a crutch. “It’s all right. All right,” he tells the mare, edging lower on the slope until he’s level with her braced, straining haunches.

 _All right_ , he repeats to himself.

Grinding his teeth, thrusting one crutch deep into the soil to support his bad leg and girding his shoulder against it, Ren hefts up the second crutch horizontally. He presses its length across the mare’s haunches beneath her scruffy bottle-brush tail, his hands on either end of the wooden pole. Then he _pushes_ , heaving forward and upward with all the strength in his back and arms. Tendons heat and scream as the mare allows him to take her weight, resting her muscles for a moment, gathering herself. And then she rises with an earth-churning stagger, floundering up and charging with a low head, stumbling several yards higher on the slope before her knees give way.

“Good, that was good,” Ren gasps. He crawls after her, hauling his body along with the crutches. He drags his satchels off her saddle and drapes them over his own shoulders. Glancing up, he can see a dark, ragged line bisecting a smattering of northern stars: the ridge blocking out the sky. They’re so close to the summit, not ten yards distant. “One more push, and we’ll be there.” Ren loops his clumsy hackamore reins over the mare’s head. Bracing himself again, he struggles above her on the hillside until the ropes stretch taut from his fists to her muzzle. “I’ll guide you. Come on.”

The mare’s nostrils flutter red with exertion and weariness.

“I know.” Steeling himself not to think of Rey, Ren clicks his tongue.

Chestnut ears prick. Eyelashes flutter over dilated pupils.

“Up you get, girl.” Another click of his tongue.

The mare groans—gathering her strength or preparing to keel down the hillside, helpless against the waiting, yapping pack.

“Come on!” He pulls hard on the reins, teeth sunk into his lower lip, brutal with her and himself.

Another protesting wheeze, her neck extended against his pressure. But then the mare’s foundering head comes up, and she lunges into Ren’s grip on her hackamore. He scrambles aside as she bypasses him with a thrust of determined hindquarters and a terror-lifted tail. One stride, two, four, nine—she crests the ridge all at once. Then she stops as though she’s been hobbled, groaning for breath, suddenly running against the very edge of her endurance. The mare stands in a shuddering silhouette against the sky, hide twitching, sides heaving like bellows, muzzle grazing the dirt.

But safe.

Ren follows her, lugging his seizing left leg, propping himself up with his crutches. The saddlebags’ weights on his shoulder are heavier than steel chains. He hauls himself upright on the chestnut’s mane and for a moment, they just breathe. Then she turns her blocky, unlovely head into his shoulder, splattering his sleeve with foaming spittle.

“That’s disgusting.”

She blows again.

“And rude.”

He feels her nostrils flare against him. Laughing, or still simply trying to breathe.

_All right. Good._

Buffalo wolves continue to prowl at the slope’s bottom, occasionally testing their weight on loosened slabs of earth, then slithering back to the valley floor with muffled yelps when the churned ground fails under their paws. Their dark shapes glide through the lowland shadows, tipped with silver and flashes of bright eyes and teeth.

Waiting.

After all, Ren and the mare can’t stay up on their ridge forever.

Triumph dims in his chest, replaced by a cold lump of exhaustion.

“Can you?” he asks the horse. She answers by shuffling one hoof forward, then another. Ren’s not capable of limping along much faster. But they’re moving, and it’s enough.

They plod along the ridge, Ren seeking a hint of firelight or the quavering, stifled notes of a harmonica. The mare’s nose drags behind his heels. His bare left foot wrinkles in protest against spiny plants and sharp, wind-lacerated stones. When he starts to bleed—no sense in baiting the wolves with that enticing, coppery odor—he unstraps his splint and binds the dirty cloth wrapping over his sole instead. Better. His left calf feels exposed and shrunken. But he can stand. He can walk. And the bracing fence stakes are better makeshift knives than his crutches if the wolves find them again.

 _When_ the wolves find them again. He’s only pissed off the pack with its failure, not deterred the hunters.

Sure enough, a howling cry rises a short half-mile behind Ren and his mare on their tortuous, bracken-strewn ridge about an hour later; the pack has found a steadier slope and mounted the hillside on swift, vengeful paws.

“I’m sorry,” Ren tells the chestnut. He hobbles to her left side and drapes the satchels over her saddlehorn. Then he mounts up again with a grunt and a groan from both of them, left leg dangling while he drags his right across her flanks. The mare’s ribs flutter with weariness under his weight. Yet when her ears prick back to catch another yowling echo from the scenting wolves, she picks up a slow, agonizing trot without prompting.

Her gait’s not swift enough to outrun the loping pack. But they’re heading into new terrain now, the ridge broadening and lowering into a pungent, sap-beaded pine copse. Cones crunch into sandy soil beneath the mare’s hooves. He’ll be able to pick a strategic place to endure the wolves' attack here, rather than balancing on the ridgeline while they come. Ren squints between stunted trees as they enter the needle-carpeted wood. Searching, searching. And...there—yes, a mounded heap of scrub brush and granite rises in a small clearing through the conifers, details shaping with the first hints of gray and lavender dawn on the horizon. Good enough.

But he’s still more than fifty yards away when sleek, silver-tipped phantoms slither between the pine trunks alongside his mare as she flounders toward the outcropping in a desperate, exhausted canter. Golden eyes gleam over lolling red tongues, the coming daylight offering a macabre view of stalking Death’s color and shape.

They’ve gone as fast as they can, but not fast enough.

Ren grips his fence stake. And then he yells—a primal urge to intimidate, to scream his rage and fear, the sound ripped from his chest, shredding his throat.

“Come on!” he bellows at the wolves skirting his chestnut’s flight, keeping to the pale, fading shadows with infuriating coyness. “What are you waiting for?” He brandishes a stake, slashing at nothing, shouting curses and taunts, wordless gulps of noise, and—

His howling jeers are suddenly, abruptly, completely silent. Ren feels them clawing through his ribcage, but there’s no sound. Just an echoing, rushing wind pressing against his ears until his temples throb, bile rising along with his yells—he’s going to be sick—and the mare lurches to a standstill, head up and shivering, the way a yearling reacts when…when...

Hearing a gunshot for the first time.

Someone nearby has fired a rifle.

Dazed, skull ringing, Ren turns his head to see wolf-shadows peeling away from the trees, fleeing the devastating crush of sound on eardrums much more sensitive than his own. Topaz eyes roll white with panic and pain.

But Ren's not afraid; he knows the reverberations from this rifle. The shuddering rebound of a gun with a pin loose in its hammer, the fired bullet ricocheting along the barrel’s rifling grooves instead of spinning smoothly through them.

Another round spits into the trees above Ren and his mare, raining down splintered bark and pebbled sap.

They’re here. Impossible, but true. Somewhere close.

Clapping his heels to the mare’s sides so that when she finally breaks into a terrified shy, she’s at least galloping in a direction he’s chosen, Ren shouts through the punishing compression in his head, “Joshua! Tell Frank to put down his goddamn rifle!”

A sibilant pause, the silence loud on his buzzing, clearing ears. Then—

“Ren?”

“Tell him to put it down before he somehow actually hits something!”

“It-it’s Ren!” A cry of disbelief, stunned but certain, voice cracking.

“Ren, you’re not dead?” someone else calls out. Gregory, half-drunk and confused.

“No shit,” Ren yells back, steering his careening mare toward the voices.

He smells smoke before he sees a fickle gleam of flames burning down with dawn in a sandy, sunken pit. He follows his nose toward the acrid odor, and— _yes_. Familiar humped bedrolls and saddlebags make piles beside the campfire's glow as it appears to him between arrow-straight pine trunks. Horses shift on their tethers, skittish with the scent of wolves on the air, with the hot, fiery flash of a rifle’s shot.

And his men.

 _Joshua. Gregory. Frank. John. Arnold. William_.

Rifles or pistols loose in their hands, eyes wide and white with astonishment, they stare as he rides up on his chestnut mare, left foot denuded of its boot, crutches hooked on the saddle before him, only a hackamore on his mount’s head. Returned to them, red-eyed with adrenaline and exhaustion, scowling in relief. He looks like shit, and he knows it. Healing leg, face coated in dirt from the hillside, bracken scratches up his arms, sweat matting his hair. He looks like he’s been through hell and back again.

He has.

Hell has hazel eyes.

But because he’s Kylo fucking Ren, he drawls out, “Well, well. Looks like you bastards are still alive.”

“I…” Joshua shakes his head like a dog with water in its ears. He doesn’t holster his pistol. “We thought you were...gone. At least, most of us did.”

“Disappointed?” Ren eyes the pistol, eyebrows raised in a show of displeasure or unconcern.

A pause, very brief. Hardly anything at all. But Ren marks it with a slight narrowing in his gaze.

“Of course not.” His lieutenant adjusts his belt; the pistol slots into its holster. But Joshua doesn’t fasten the leather strap. “It’s good to see you, Ren.”

“So what the hell happened?” Gregory asks after a moment, while all eyes anchor on Joshua’s unbuckled holster. The edge of his Bowie knife gleams in the firelight. He holds it casually by his side. Not threatening. But unsheathed. Plenty sober, now.

Ren scans the rest of his crew with a single swift look, assessing their stances across the camp. Their weapons. Joshua and Gregory, Frank with his cranky rifle—uncocked but with a finger on the trigger. Arnold and William, brothers and shotguns. John cups one hand around his harmonica and the other against his boot, where he keeps his throwing knife.

Ren’s got a pair of crutches and two fence stakes. A healing leg.

But he also has his tongue.

“After you bastards took off, I got picked up by a homesteader.” He nudges the mare through his men to the fireside like he owns the place. He dismounts with gritted teeth, concealing the mouth-cramping pain in his leg with a head bent over his saddlebags. He tosses his satchels carelessly down beside the fire in a prime spot. “Stupid chit of a girl. Thought she was nursing me back to health from a couple bruises. Liked my pretty face, I guess.”

A muffled laugh from John. _Good_.

“But I stuck around, letting her play at it. Why? Because she was a little bitch from Sweet Springs. When I asked nicely, she told me all there was to know about the gunslingers and bank security. Told me about the railroad line, too.”

“Really?” Frank guffaws. “Because of your pretty face?”

“You know I can take what I want. However I want it.” Ren’s stomach twists while brutal words spin easily over his tongue, weaving a tale like he always does. But he curls his lips against his revulsion. Almost a smile. Because— _she’s nothing. She didn’t believe me. She sent me away_.

“At first, I asked with pretty words to match my pretty face. People told her things in the town. She was a sweet little bundle to look at, damn sure. All those nice fellows, mooning over her. She knew a lot. But then she told me everything she knew and more when I asked without pretty words. Anything to make me stop asking.”

“You kill her?” Arnold, licking his lips. Always so eager.

“I got what I needed. And she won’t be alerting any lawmen.”

There's a breathless, greedy moment while they wait for him to elaborate, to work his tales of torture and murder. His savagery against this girl.

But Ren doesn’t. Let them wonder. Let them hope for details let slip here and there, the atrocity of what he’s done intoxicating to them, almost better than whiskey. Let them imagine _all_ the things he’s done.

That pause...and then Joshua nods. “Good. So, what’s the plan?”

Ren grins. _Relief_ , but these men will chalk it up to fond memories of his own brutality. “Water and feed for my horse. Arnold, use your canteen. Then we’ll talk.”

Once he’s seen the chestnut rubbed down, fed and watered like she deserves—Arnold grouses a short protest about wasting his good drinking water on a horse, but shuts right up under a glare from Ren—he settles down onto his heels beside the fire. Ignoring the throb in his leg, he snaps his fingers for William to relinquish a _cigarillo_ , then cups his hands around the slender smoking taper. William doesn’t so much as mutter, having caught the edge of Ren’s glare to Arnold. He inhales his satisfaction, then expels a ghostly plume into the hazy dawn air above the flames. The _cigarillo_ 's smoke lacerates his throat. He draws it deeper into his chest on the next inhale. Proving himself to his crew.

And to himself, as well.

_Kylo Ren has returned._

“The mayor’s still keeping my wanted posters nailed up in the streets,” he says with a gray breath. “But the town’s gotten too nancy for its own good. Pretty-boy for a sheriff. And lawmen can be bought off these days, for the right price. Not that we’ll need to. After all, we’re just riding through to make withdrawals at a few respectable establishments.”

That gets a good laugh. It’s not many details that he hasn’t already told his men about Sweet Springs, but he’s spun his information just a little differently with intelligence he’s gleaned from Rey. Her fear of the lawmen—she, an honest rancher.

_Naked shoulders, cold water, sunlight._

“And there’s discontent about the mayor’s permit for a railroad line in the valley. Some clever bastard already lit up a bottle of nitro on the tracks. We could be heroes for doing our night’s work in town, if we happen to thwart those plans while we’re at it. Destabilize things. And supposing we've got a little time to torch some of Gregory’s whiskey on the line, blow out a few rails...They'd likely thank us for our service, those Sweet Springs folks.”

This is news to Ren's gang. Raised eyebrows, pursed lips. A wolf-whistle from Frank.

Oh yes, they like this idea. Well, except for Gregory shifting his grip on his Bowie knife to protect his whiskey bottle against abuse. The stories that’ll be told of the Ren Seven if they pull off this stunt…

Every outlaw secretly yearns to be the hero of his own tale.

Ren just has to be careful that his men don’t take their yearning too far. Humiliation—yes, he wants that for his mother. For her to recognize what she’s done to him, and to grovel in her shame while he rides away with everything she holds dear. Her precious town abandoned as folk flee the chaos that she herself created.  _Kylo Ren._

But he has no desire to see her dead. Not with Arnold always so keen to do the honors.

_Very careful._

“So,” he says. To a man, his crew leans toward the fire. Toward him to hear their plan.

To hear the tale that will be told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wolves are lovely, gentle, skittish creatures, and we shouldn't hate on them!
> 
> ...but in good Spaghetti Western tradition, I must.
> 
> Ack, I'm yet again behind on answering comments--this week has been a whirlwind at work. But know that I'm reading and treasuring each note, and I _will_ be answering soon!
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @mrsmancuspia created an [ absolutely smashing piece](https://78.media.tumblr.com/017f8a79ee9f07db1f313844d8983be2/tumblr_peo8zqGBbD1uphqedo1_1280.png) of Rey and Ren riding Little Bee and Millie, and I'm in love. Thank you, darling!

With a watch kept in turns, Ren’s gang sleeps through the day. William draws the first three hours. The others bed down while he stations himself at the edge of their camp’s clearing, their guns and knives laid within easy reach beside their blankets. Ren follows suit. But the morning sun is fickle and ticklish over his eyelids; he turns irritably within his flannels, seeking concealment from the light’s accusation. Stirring dawn breezes whisper of work to be done while he lies here, useless and dull. _Repairing fences, checking traplines, planing shingles against the first autumn storms_...but that isn’t his work. He’s a man of the night.

Ren orders his mind to rest and his body to sleep.

Yet weeks of waking at daybreak on the ranch have robbed him of his ability to coax capricious slumber. He's accustomed to rising into action at first light. Grumbling and wincing at the early hour, yes, but then walking in tactile pleasure through dewed grasses that will dry and sharpen with the day’s heat, enjoying the moist _swish_ against his bare left ankle, riding down to a cattle enclosure with soaring hawks and larks calling overhead.

_No._

He kicks down deeper into his bedroll. He can’t fidget overmuch, not with William standing guard barely ten yards distant. The man holds a shotgun ready across his thighs, eyes roving through the pines for irregular movement and noise—anything beyond a squirrel’s chattering or the rustle of a nesting raven. If he’s to be ready for the Sweet Springs job tonight, Ren has to sleep. With his men on guard, he should be able to let his bone-deep weariness carry him off into unconsciousness, easy as a tired sigh. But the daylight befuddles his mind, drawing red veins of magma across his eyelids. His body itches with discomfort on the lumpy ground—not so much worse than the shanty mattress with its clumped straw and rough cotton, but still.

Different.

And Ren has to acknowledge: he’s grown soft.

Only a month, and Kylo Ren’s become almost as much of a cunt as Matthew.

Goddamn Matthew.

He’ll grind himself hard again. He has to. Take on a rind and a bitterness. So his discomfort on the ground is a good thing. It’ll give him the short, irritated temper that his men are accustomed to see and fear.

Yes, he’s fine.

If only his left leg weren’t aching. The bones may’ve knitted themselves together again, but his muscles are tender and weak. Ren grits his teeth into his cheek and endures.

Fifteen minutes.

A half hour.

Torture _._

Eventually, he can’t stand the throb pulsing and cramping all along his left side anymore. Stifling a groan, Ren rolls over. It’s a normal enough motion for a sleeper seeking a more forgiving patch of ground, isn’t it? William doesn’t twitch from his leaning pose against a nearby pine. Releasing his breath and his lip from between his teeth, Ren settles slowly back down into his blankets. But he's disturbed the calligraphy box nestled at his bedroll’s bottom. He feels the filigree clasp part and the lid crack open...and then something small, cold, and smooth brushes against his left ankle.

His eyes snap open.

The ink bottle? No, it's not the correct shape. Then _what_? He rolls his foot experimentally over this little curiosity. Like his ink bottle, it’s a cylinder of some sort, but it’s squat with a curved neck and a flat top. And it’s a distraction from his aching bones. Keeping one eye on William and his shotgun, Ren snakes a stealthy arm down past his knees under the blankets, fingers scrabbling through folds of greasy cloth. Catching up the odd object, he fishes it out with excruciating slowness. Then, squinting along his nose, Ren evaluates his find.

It’s a vial of clear liquid with a printed label. Shielding the glass from fickle darts of sunlight filtering down through sap-hung, coniferous branches over the camp, Ren turns the bottle over in his hand to read its stamp.

_Morphine._

She...she’s given him morphine. The morphine from Sweet Springs.

Ren can’t stop himself from hooking his right ankle around the calligraphy box. He inches it up the bedroll until he can duck down under his musty, sour blankets to investigate its contents. And: beside his pen and brushes nestled into their green silk depressions is...a capped syringe.

Yes, morphine. Like she promised.

Something in his chest twists painfully under his ribcage. Worse than his leg.

He needs to sleep, and he needs to be strong enough for his gang’s work tonight. Strong enough that they won’t notice his injury. Kylo Ren doesn’t have weaknesses like mending, aching bones. Or pains in his chest. _No._

He doesn’t want anything from her—her pity.

But.

Removing the needle’s cap with his teeth, Ren draws the syringe full to empty its bottle. Wincing, working by touch alone and hidden from view deep in his bedroll, he injects the narcotic into his elbow’s crook. Hiding his weakness, and his shame.

The effect is immediate. Morphine flows along his bloodstream, borne quickly through his body with his fast-pounding pulse. His muscles soften from their pained clench. A tingling numbness ghosts through the tips of his fingers. Ticklish. So ticklish. And...it’s a bit funny. No, not funny, he’s boneless and this...is...hilarious. Ren has to fight euphoric, pitchy laughter burbling into his chest where a painful knot used to reside like an uncracked nut. He only just manages to replace the vial and syringe in his calligraphy box. An unsteady foot kicks it closed and down to the bedroll’s bottom, his muscles sluggish and unresponsive. Painless. He sags back. Mouth smoothing from a grimace, his mind lapses with gentle washes of color behind his eyelids. A breath melts him toward unconsciousness.

Even after everything, Rey still gave him the morphine.

The thought makes him smile, a foolish giggle in his chest raising its hopeful head again...and then he fades.

Ren wakes after what seems like barely a full heartbeat later when a chestnut muzzle thrusts down into the bedroll against his shoulder. He blinks sandy, sticky eyes, disoriented. But... _chestnut. Horse._ His mare.

“What?” he grumbles. She snorts and lips the end of his nose, yellowed teeth grazing against his skin. A threat that she’ll bite down and drag him out of his comfortable blankets if he doesn’t do the job himself. “Fine, fine…” Pushing her away, Ren shakes back his bedroll’s covering.

Night.

It’s already night. A rim of sunlight disappears over the western mountains and speckles only the very highest pines with dying gold. Beads of amber sap glimmer. His men are packing their blankets into saddlebags, Arnold jostling Frank’s shoulder ungently to rouse him from a snoring stupor.

Ren silently blesses his mare for coming to wake him before one of the others has. Kylo Ren should never be the final man to stir—he should be the first, always ready for action, primed for a fight no matter the hour. As it is, he’s barely standing and knotting up his satchels before indolent Frank.

This can’t happen again.

Damn morphine.

Yet he feels rested, better than he has since leaving the ranch. Only last night...but the throb in his leg has dissolved. His head is clear.

“Mount up,” he says to his men. Hands fisted in his mare’s mane for leverage, Ren swings into her saddle with barely a groan. If he makes a noise at all between his teeth, it’s muffled beneath squeaking leather while his crew cinch their horses’ girths, step into their stirrups, and adjust saddlebags on their horns. He takes up his hackamore reins.

He needs a proper bridle. Stocking up for the long retreat west is the reason they’re riding through Sweet Springs, anyhow. No one’s asked Ren what happened to his own horse, why he’s riding a chestnut nag instead of the blooded quarter horse he'd stolen from a cavalry encampment on the eastern plains. Or at the very least, asked why he isn’t complaining about his mount. Why he’s demanding the best of everything for a sag-backed mare, as though she’s a pedigreed stallion. If he can tack her up with burnished leather and silver on her bridle, his men might never demand an explanation for his capriciousness. The mare’s proven her worth to him; when dolled up with a sterling headstall, she won’t cramp the Ren Seven’s style, so crucial for an outlaw band.

Besides, it’s not as though Gregory’s knock-kneed mount is any paragon, either.

Ren needs a good pair of boots, another set of trousers, a black bandana, and a crisp black hat for the same reason that he needs sterling silver tack for his mare.

He’ll have all this—and more—if their visit to the Sweet Springs stores and vaults goes as planned.

Which it will.

It has to.

As the last man to mount up, Frank scuffs ash over embers from the camp’s fire and over his own boots, then falls into line behind Ren, Joshua, Gregory, John, William, and Arnold. They make their way through the spindly pine copse and along a deer trail. This path leads down from the dry, sandy ridge to Sweet Springs' rivers, clear and swift between their banks in even the hottest summer months.

An irrational flicker of satisfaction flares in Ren’s chest when his mare takes to the narrow trail without hesitation, surefooted as a mule on skittering pebbles and shale while one of the horses behind her balks at the precarious route. The chestnut walks steadily on beneath his heels and hackamore, a simple determination to move forward—away from whatever horrors lurk in her memory—keeping her balanced above the shifting soil with more poise than a cow pony spinning on a dime. He trusts her not to fall. After last night, he’d trust this mare with anything.

So it’s not satisfaction that Ren feels. It’s pride. Even less rational. But it makes him grin.

“Use your legs,” he calls over his shoulder to Arnold, whose fussing mount is holding up their line by refusing to step off from the sandy plateau's safety. This must’ve been the same trail his men used to climb to the pine copse along the ridgeline. But descending is always harder than going up, looking down at how far a body will fall to the flatlands below...Except for Ren’s mare, apparently, who treats this dark slope the same way she'd treat a daylight meander through daisy-strewn pasturelands. Plodding steps, inexorable and steadfast.

Ears pinned, Arnold’s horse squeals when pebbles rattle and bounce out of sight into steep, pitchy darkness sloping down to the valley.

Hide twitching, Ren’s mare snorts her disdain for such high-strung theatrics. He adds to her eloquence, “What are your spurs for?”

A grunt. The riders and their mounts fall into place behind his chestnut.

With no howling wolves or shotgun blasts to waylay them, they wind down the trail’s switchbacks into the valley without incident.

“Now straight for the town.”

Giddy with the flatlands’ sturdy ground beneath their hooves, the gang’s horses pick up a gallop on a single cue—even Arnold’s recalcitrant mount leaps forward with the rest. Joshua’s gelding keeps pace easily with Ren's chestnut as Ren leads them on, but the lieutenant makes no move to overtake Ren's position. He reins in so that his gelding’s nose levels with the mare’s neck. The swifter animal tosses his head against pressure on his bit, forelegs flinging out with a desire to gallop at his full capacity; Joshua’s hands lower and draw back on the reins.

_Good._

With thick lowland grasses muffling the thunder of galloping hooves, they cross the valley unmolested and unchallenged by homesteaders, lawmen, or hunting buffalo wolves. They set their course for a beam of lanternlight burning from a belfry in the valley's northwest quadrant. The encircled land is vast and the night dark enough that it would be easy to lose their way among rolling hills and pinnacles, but Sweet Springs' sanctimonious vanity guides them on.

 _How like his mother._ Ren’s lip curls.

A half-mile from the town’s outbuildings, he reins the chestnut back from her gallop to a jog-trot. They’re here to get what they’ve come for and get out, leaving Sweet Springs to ruin of its own volition behind them; even if they don’t manage to blow apart a section of the railway track, it shouldn’t take much to overset this town’s tenuous hold on civility. Besides, Ren’s not looking for a shootout tonight. Much as he’d like to gallop down Main Street firing off a rifle, breaking glazed windows from tea rooms and millineries where pitying or revolted stares have crinkled his neck, reddened his ears, the polished glass reflecting his shame, his guilt...that’s for other jobs. Other towns.

Instead, his gang approaches quietly. They pass darkened houses in the town’s outskirts, treading now on flat-trampled dirt. Their horses’ hooves echo through hushed, deserted streets. But no one steps from shadowed boardwalks or from behind tottering ranks of roped barrels to challenge them. Even with an explosive threat on the railway line, the town’s complacent.

Which seems...less like Leia Organa. Well, it’s been more than a decade since Ren last saw his mother. Perhaps she’s changed, grown sluggish as well as vain in her dotage.

But to work.

A click of John’s knife in a lock opens Patterson’s Tannery and Leatherworks. Holding his breath against vile odors bubbling up from vats standing in the shabby clapboard room over night-banked fires, Ren requisitions a silver-spangled bridle for his mare. John opens the cobbler’s shop for him to take his pick of boots. A haberdashery provides new neckerchiefs for them all, along with trousers and a crisp-crowned black Stetson for Ren. They relieve the general store of several sacks of corn meal, along with three barrels of salted pork and another of herring. The Sweet Springs gunsmith will find himself missing a pretty lever-action _Centennial Model_ Winchester and a cardboard box of rifle rounds.

No windows are broken, no shots fired. But shopkeepers will wake to fear and mistrust, infecting this town customer by customer with their fidgeting fingers, their miscounted change, their worried glances at every passing face.

Pulling on his new boots, Ren grins in savage satisfaction.

He takes what he wants, yes. But there are many ways of getting it.

And if his gang’s restless while he equips himself and his horse?

There’re the saloon and bank left to patronize. Plenty of boozing and breaking to do.

But first, to leave a calling card…

“Pull down my wanted posters along the main street,” Ren tells his crew. Even as thickly clustered as Kylo Ren’s posters are, pasted up on windows or nailed to posts, covering over notices for long-past knitting bees, sell-ups from vanquished homesteaders, or ladies’ aid societies, it’s barely fifteen minutes’ work to tear them all loose. Ren distributes his flyers on the counters of each shop they’ve patronized.

Just the right malicious touch for a man with his reputation.

The saloon yields up its supply easily, a rifle butt breaking open shoddy iron locks on shelves tucked behind the bar. Chortling, Gregory sweeps an armload of whiskey bottles to his chest, cradling them as though they’re firstborn sons. Generously, he passes around an open jug. They each take a deep pull of liquid glinting black and amber under the cloud-scuttled moonlight filtering into the bar.

The taste makes Ren gag, a throb spasming in his leg again.

Flesh memory.

Even though it’s darker in the saloon than the street outside, he forces himself to swallow without grimacing. Principle, because—

 _Shit_ , he’s going to have to get over this. And damn fast. An outlaw who can’t hold his whiskey’s more of a cunt than Matthew.

“Vault,” he spits in a hard whisper against the whiskey's aftertaste, wishing he could vomit up its fumes and scrub his mouth clean with sandpaper. He thunks the bottle into Gregory’s chest. “Cork it.”

Saddlebags heavy, horses walking with ponderous, swaying gaits beneath their rich burdens, the Ren Seven head deeper into Sweet Springs. They approach the town's bank. Its painted false front stands above a flight of stone steps beside the...courthouse? Ren recalls this secondary building as a dancehall; whores’ earnings could be directly deposited into the vaults, and gentlemen could discreetly make withdrawals before entering the pleasure house’s doors. What the hell has his mother done to the place?

But—

“Ren?” Joshua’s asking in a low voice, shaking him from his frowning reverie. Ren's crew has gathered behind him while he stands at the bottom of the steps, scowling up at the courthouse’s imposing facade.

 _Right._ Ren snaps himself into action.

“Arnold, Gregory, Frank, William, you’re on guard at the doors. Don’t shoot unless you have to. Remember: we don’t want a firefight. Joshua, John, with me.”

In and out, quick and intangible as shadows, but for the posters they leave behind. Inspiring a different fear than other outlaw gangs, who advertise their presence with blasting shotguns and noonday hold-ups. Because Kylo Ren is cunning. _He_ is cunning, taking what he wants, inspiring tales in his wake that try to explain how he’s done his thieving and slipped away unscathed. Soon enough, he won’t have to tell his crew the stories of his exploits anymore. They’ll hear tales of themselves, and be satisfied with the men they aspire to be. That they believe they are.

And perhaps—just perhaps—he won’t have to kill again.

Locks on the bank’s doors offer no challenge to John’s sly, efficient knife—the ornate knobs are heavy with scrollwork and patterned relief, thinning the metal between fancy designs. Gaudy and impressive. Certainly more concerned with their surfaces than their innards. Paying greater attention to pulchritude than pick-locks. Their tumblers click open with barely a jiggle from the blade.

“That looks like an invitation,” Ren drawls for style. John grins appreciatively up at him, sheathing his knife in his boot. Joshua nods. _Spin the tale._ “And it’d be rude of us to refuse.”

The bank’s interior smells overpoweringly of wood polish. In low light refracting through the windows' beveled glass, velvet-upholstered chairs, brass chandeliers, and a glossy counter with wrought iron grilling appear as dim, hinted shapes and textures. Ripe with promise. There’s a tidy fortune in the bank’s furnishings alone.

But that’s not why they’ve come.

Ren strides behind the counter. He halts before a discreet panel set into the wall, nearly invisible unless a searcher knows what to look for—slight irregularities in the wood grain, a knothole shaped too neatly to be natural. If he hadn’t visited this bank with his parents as a child, he might’ve been baffled by where to find its precious vault, confused as any common thief in the night. But Sweet Springs yields her secrets to him like a returning golden son; he’ll plunder her well in thanks. Ren runs his hands over the panel, touching here and there against its knotholes, half-remembering the way bankers’ hands used to glide over the grains in secretive code...

In the end, it’s simply pressing his thumb against the centermost knot that does it. The panel shudders and cracks away from the wall on well-oiled hinges.

Nothing secret after all.

It’s madness that he’s disappointed.

“Joshua. John.” Ren jerks his head, pulling back on the loosened panel and exposing the bank’s hulking vault. Its locks and combination knobs leer out from the wall.

“Hmm.” Joshua runs his hands over the safe’s exterior. He kneels and presses an ear to the inch-thick metal door. Closing his eyes, murmuring to himself, he begins to turn the combination locks, listening for a faint but telltale _click_ that heralds a tumbler falling into place. Patient and clever, he’s a superb safe-cracker. And indeed, it takes Joshua fewer than ten minutes to sort through and align the vault's hundreds of possible number-and-letter combinations.

“C…” he says, head cocked, muttering an affirmation to himself when he hears the click. “3, and a P. Zero. A random combination. Still no harder to crack than a birthday, if you know how to listen.” Joshua rises and steps back, dusting his palms with satisfaction.

John takes his place, kneeling behind the counter and inserting his knife gently into the repository's single keyhole. Dual-locking mechanisms are meant to deter and stall thieves; Ren almost laughs at how easily John coaxes these second tumblers into alignment. Other avaricious burglars might be defeated, but his crew cracks the Sweet Springs safe in fifteen minutes flat. Nodding his success, John steps back in turn. Ren cranks the vault’s handle down.

 _Open_.

Coins are swept into leather satchels that muffle the bullion’s cheerful clink. Bound stacks of dollars follow, the notes crisp enough to slice knuckles. Ren grins when a pile of Benjamins cut through the tender web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. If it isn’t a fortune they’re culling from this vault, it’s damn close. Certainly enough to see the Ren Seven well clear of this town, and many beyond it. Far ahead of the railway line’s advance.

The take's more than he expected. Perhaps his mother's done something right for the town, after all.

Well.

Leaving one of his wanted posters weighed down with an insultingly tiny stack of pennies on the safe’s barren floor, where Ren’s charcoal-drawn face looms up like a pasquinade of the very devil, he closes the vault and conceals it behind its panel again. Let the tellers find his poster in the morning when they open their doors to customers.

Let them be confused. Let them be afraid.

Pocket seams taking a respectable strain from their night’s earnings, Ren, Joshua, and John stride with victorious heels back through the bank’s tiled entrance hall, to where the others are waiting on the steps outside.

“All quiet,” Arnold reports. He shrugs toward the deserted street, at shuttered windows above vandalized shops where their owners sleep, all unknowing. And then, “How much?” eyeing the satchels.

“Plenty,” Ren says. “Now someone wake up Frank and let’s get—”

Frank, slumped against the steps and snoring through his drooping, smoke-stained mustache. Frank, who lurches when Gregory nudges his splayed-out feet with an ungentle kick. Whose rifle—cocked for guard duty with its loose pin in the hammer—clatters out of his sleep-slackened grip. It strikes the stone stairs, reverberations through its stock rattling that treacherous, unpredictable pin.

The gun goes off.

“ _Shit!_ ”

There’s a mad dash for the gang's horses waiting below in the street, unhobbled but for their trailing reins. A high, squealing whinny of alarm—and the animals scatter before the thundering group of men running down the stairs toward them, arms waving, mouths wide and black with urgency. Prey animals confronted by charging predators, the horses leap into a gallop as a herd, forcing Ren's men to chase after their fleeing mounts on foot—

A window sash flies open above the saloon while William and Gregory sprint past its swinging doors, running after their fleeing, shying horses. A shout goes up in a ringing baritone:

“ _Thieves! Outlaws! In the streets!_ ”

“Shut up!” Disoriented with the chaos and waking, Frank grabs and cocks his rifle, firing toward the noise.

“No—” Ren yells, too late. He only just manages to grab Frank under the arms and haul him down the bank's steps, stumbling, half-rolling when a gun blasts a reply from the saloon apartment’s shattered window. Pellets of stone spray their faces as the slug buries itself where Frank had been flailing only a moment before.

“You bastards!” comes another roar from the saloon—the owner, ferociously awake and protecting his merchandise. A shotgun’s action pumps. _Click, thunk_. A terrifying sound. “Get the fu—”

“What seems to be the trouble, Maurice?”

_Wait, what the hell?_

Because Ren knows that brash, cock-sure voice—

“Bandits, Dameron!”

“Yes, I can see that.” A Colt pistol’s muzzle flares from up the street as it discharges, illuminating the shooter's creamy Stetson. The revolver's shot sings within inches of Ren’s head, striking the steps behind him with a whine and a splintering crack from the stone. “Now, I didn’t have to miss,” Poe Dameron calls out. “That’s me asking nicely for you to stay where you are, with your hands above your head. If you don’t cooperate, my next bullet’s going to move just a bit closer.”

_Oh, fuck._

He can’t let either the man or his bullets get closer. Because this is Poe _fucking_ Dameron. They haven’t seen each other in over ten years—but Ren’s isn’t a face that anyone forgets, anymore than Dameron’s is. He hasn’t wrapped his bandana over his jaw yet, and if that fucker recognizes him enough to speak his name, his _other_ name—

Ren's plan has gone to hell— _in and out, no firefight_ —and once he gets himself and his gang out of here, he’s going to _kill_ Frank.

“How’s your pursuit, Sheriff?” Dameron calls over his shoulder. He doesn't lower his revolver, cocking back its hammer and advancing with leisurely strides down the street toward Ren and Frank. “Hands,” he reminds them in a tone that’s almost conversational when Ren inches a finger for his lovely new Winchester. It’s not loaded, but if he can get to the rounds in his pocket…

But wait— _sheriff?_ Isn’t Dameron—?

“Four of ’em and their horses. Just one more still loose, but—ah, nicely done, Jeffries! Five. All of ’em.”

Not-sheriff Poe Dameron’s a mystery for another time, though. Because how in hellfire has Sweet Springs' deputized cavalry responded so quickly? It can’t have been more than a minute since Frank’s rifle went off and brought the peaceful, orderly raid crashing down on Ren’s head. These lawmen and white hats should’ve had to rouse themselves from their beds, find their boots and guns and asses, then stumble out into the streets while still half-asleep. Ren’s crew could’ve gotten handily away.

It’s almost as though the town’s lawmen have readied themselves for something like tonight’s disturbance. Not patrolling the streets, but prepared.

And it only takes Ren a moment to see the truth—because of course.

 _Rey_.

There’s no time to sort through the roil of emotions in his gut, either—rage, betrayal, despair, and rage again, flaring so hot it sears under his ribs, burns bile into his mouth—because Dameron’s approaching with a tilted head, squinting through the dimly lit street at Ren.

Right on cue, the night goes from bad to much, much worse.

“Kylo Ren? _Ben Solo?_ ”

There’s nothing Ren can say to that. It’s not a question from Dameron, anyhow. This gunslinger knows damn well who he is. So bravado's his only defense, with Frank perplexed beside him and his crew being herded on foot down Main Street between the sheriff’s mounties. Close enough to hear those fatal words. _That name._

“What’re you going to do if I am? Call for my mother?”

Dameron frowns. “Not much good that’d do. But I’ll take you to the mayor with pleasure.”

“Same difference, asshole.”

A pause. Then Dameron tilts back his Stetson, evaluating Ren with a twisted mouth. Amusement, or disgust. His grip on his leveled double-action Colt is rock-steady. “So you don’t know?”

“Know what?” Ren can’t help taking the bait, he’s losing control of the situation, he’s _already_ lost it, and Joshua’s frowning at him like he’s something disgusting that’s had the audacity to die in a watering hole—

“Leia Organa hasn’t held the Sweet Springs mayoral office for several years. She’s been in jail since Armitage Hux seized the job with the town's last vote. He’s kept up your posters, though. And I can’t say you’ve changed for the better in ten years.”

“That’s a goddamn lie!” Ren’s only half-aware of grabbing for his unloaded Winchester, but he’ll wield it like a club if he has to. “She’s—she—”

“You thought you were plotting against your own mother? That you were raiding her town?” Joshua cuts across him. Not reining in his gelding or his disdain now. “You said this was a supply run with a little combustion on the side, Ren. Not revenge. That’s something different. Personal. A job I didn’t sign up for. Risks I didn’t agree to take in my professional work. None of us did.”

“You lied,” Gregory adds laconically.

“It doesn’t matter who she is, who the mayor is—”

“You lied,” Joshua echoes Gregory. “You lied and endangered all of us on this job. You knew the added risks and refused to share them. You losing your temper, for one. Family grudges, another. Your history with this town. Your _real_ history. What else did you lie about? Your name, it seems.”

Everything, _every-fucking-thing_ is fracturing, and there’s not a damn thing he can do to stop it—

“Put the rifle down, Solo.” Dameron's pistol glints in the harsh, pale moonlight. “Don’t reach for it again. The only reason I haven’t already blown your hand off—again, I might add—is in courtesy to Mrs. Organa. Again.”

No—he can do one thing.

He can make Kylo Ren worthy of remembering.

And he will.

“ _Run_ ,” he grits out to Frank from the corner of his mouth.

And then Ren grabs his Winchester, swinging it up to his shoulder. All the lawmen’s barrels swivel toward him. Frank bolts without a backward glance. A confused, shuffling moment while the sheriff and Dameron try to decide whether to shoot Ren or give chase to fleeing Frank—John’s hidden boot knife flashes within the encircled gang, slicing through one of the deputies’ girths so that the man bellows a startled yell and crashes sideways off his horse into the man beside him, Gregory tackles the nearest lawmen and wrestles his confiscated pistol free, firing at point-blank range—horses rear and shy, shotguns discharge—Ren drops flat to avoid the rounds exploding over his head, knowing he can’t return fire anyhow—

Thirty seconds, and it’s over. One deputy dead in the street, another hauling himself over to the boardwalk with a broken ankle from falling awkwardly off his mount as his girth gave way. Six of the Ren Seven are gone, vanishing into the night with whatever they can carry or steal as they flee. Some of them might make it.

And Kylo Ren is left behind on his stomach, every law-abiding rifle, shotgun, and revolver trained on his prone body.

“Drag him off to jail.” A corpulent, oafish man that the others address as Sheriff Canady takes charge now that the danger’s passed. Two of his deputies approach Ren. They kick aside his useless Winchester, cuff his hands behind him, and haul him up by his wrists. His shoulders wrench and his tendons scream. He refuses to cringe or whimper.

“What a nice reunion this will be,” Dameron smirks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh-oh...he's in trouble now!
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	12. Chapter 12

“So they’re planning to run the railroad line north of some town a few miles west. Sweetwater? Then all the way on to the Pacific.”

“We had to run when we could,” Rose murmurs in a low voice, eyes filmy and glimmering while she stares down at her feet.

“Mmm...but it’s Sweet Springs, not Sweetwater,” Rey corrects Finn. She squats down beside Rose with elbows braced against her knees, evaluating a rough sketch of the continent that Finn’s marked out with a stick in packed dirt near the porch. “You had to run, or else you would’ve gone all the way to the shore with the line. You would’ve had to.” She doesn't mention their shackles, but the knowledge lingers between them all.

“Or died.” Rose wipes a hand beneath her nose, shrugging into or against Finn’s comforting palm cupping her shoulder. “Probably died. The overseers think we’re disposable. I suppose we are, in their eyes. And to the line's investors. There’re plenty more like us back east wanting jobs. But we’re not expendable to each other.”

“We’re sticking together for the long haul,” Finn says with forced brightness, squeezing his assurance on Rose’s shoulder.

Her lips tremble at the corners, half dimpled smile, half tears. But then Rose clears her throat, lowering her voice again to Tico’s pitch from a higher catch of grief. She points at the dusty sketch. “We laid track between one town and the next, and then a locomotive would start running the line.”

“But destroyed track can be replaced,” Rey clarifies. “After the explosion—”

“Any time something like that happened, we were put back to work right after.” Rose nods bitterly. “Laying more ties, pounding spikes. Dispensable if it happened again. But this time, Finn and I were lucky.”

“Then it’s not enough to destroy the tracks. They’ll only be rebuilt. And other people could get hurt if there’s another explosion.”

Finn’s hand clenches more tightly over Rose’s shoulder. “Yes. Might take a while for new shipments to be carted out on a wagon train, but that won’t stop the line. Just delay it. A few weeks, at most.”

Rose’s fingers skitter up to her throat. Her nails fasten around a curious metal curve hanging on a tie over her collar. Her knuckles whiten, the ornament visibly denting her palm. “Because metal’s cheap enough to mine and smelt for buyers who can afford to finance a whole line. Not cheap for miners, though.”

“Tico and Paige came from a mining town in the Dakotas,” Finn explains to Rey.

“Hays,” Rose mutters, fingers working along the grooves spanning her necklace. “Our parents worked in a smelting plant. We would’ve too, except it…” She drags fiercely at her leather cord. The thong cuts an angry red weal against her neck.

“Not nitroglycerin, but there’s other stuff that does damage when it overheats,” Finn says.

“So when the railroad men came through, offering pay and work, promises we didn’t know they'd never keep—”

“You took your only choice.” An ache pulses under Rey's ribs. Her fingers twitch, and she wonders whether she should touch Rose’s hand. Offer comfort. Or will comfort only make this woman cry with the great hiccoughing sobs that choke her sometimes? All unexpected in the midst of skinning rabbits or mending tack, Finn holding her hard while she pounds at him with callused fists, while she just screams and screams into his shirtfront...

She doesn’t know.

Because everything about these two is unfamiliar. Their easy smiles. The way Rose can laugh one moment, then wail her grief and loss as though she’s shattering apart in her very next breath.

Their companionship.

And the way they’ve fitted themselves into Rey’s life as though patching over a wound she’s not even aware of bearing. A gulping hollow in the pit of her stomach. Plastering it, bandaging it. She doesn’t hate the feeling. Not _this_ feeling. But watching Finn and Rose together—it hurts. Rose, especially. If Finn disappoints her, who will this fierce, lonely woman have left?

So Rey doesn’t hate the feeling, but it makes her afraid.

She’s afraid for Finn, too. What happens to him when he learns that his friend Tico isn’t who he says he is? Isn’t a he at all, but a she? _Rose._ And in love with him. What then?

The betrayal of it.

Or the joy.

Too many uncertainties. She doesn’t know what to do about any of them. Rey, who always knows what to do. Or if she doesn’t, can at least make a decision and stick to it like nefariously tacky pine sap. So:

“Destroying the track won't stop the line,” she says, retreating to safe, hard facts. “But what about the locomotive?”

Finn squats down beside Rose. He points to his dirt sketch. “Tracks need to be completed all the way to Sweet Springs before a locomotive runs the route, station to station. You’d have to wait for that. Or you could ride to the next town east and do the job there. But...that could work. Couldn’t it?”

Rose shakes her head before Rey rejects the notion herself, strands of black hair falling loose from her queue and framing her curved cheeks. “Rey won’t leave her ranch for that much time. It was over two weeks by wagon when we came from the last town, Finn. We had to wait for the carts to catch up with us so we could eat, remember? It’ll be faster on horseback, but...”

Even riding at double a wagon train’s speed—one week out, another back—is too long for her to be away. So much can happen in two weeks. _Matthew_. Rey nods at Rose, biting her lips until a salty thread of blood slicks her tongue.

“If you wait until the train comes all the way through the valley…” Finn trails off. “You haven’t seen what happens. What it does.”

She hasn’t, but Rey’s heard.

_Rotting buffalo carcasses, the train's screaming whistle scaring off prey for miles around, dynamite and dust storms, contaminated groundwater, flies and buzzards with the stench of disease._

She’s dealt with the hungry, raging wolves herself.

“What’s the timeline for these rails? For when the locomotive makes its first run after the track’s laid?”

“Overseers didn’t talk about things like that in front of us.” Rose’s plump mouth makes an ugly, bitter twist. “They may’ve treated us like animals, but they knew not to talk about important things when we could overhear. They knew we were people, that we could understand, but they put us in chains anyway—”

Finn leans over to brush his fingers against Rose’s ankle, where her skin is slowly healing from its shackle-cut abrasions. There’s a haunted hollowness in his eyes, a rage, yet he speaks to her so gently. “Not anymore.”

Rose’s shoulders hitch at his proximity, his touch. Her breath catches, bobbing in her throat. But then her chin tilts very slightly upward, and her mouth softens while she raises a hand to Finn’s temple, to where memory crinkles the corners of his eyes with an anger he’s stamped down to be gentle with her...

“I have to go to Sweet Springs, then. I need to know,” Rey cuts between them, speaking too high, too fast, breaking the moment before they do something they’ll regret. Something that can’t be undone. It’s not that she wants to ride again into town so soon—her skin prickles at the thought—but she has to say something to crack the thrumming silence between Finn and Rose, the unspoken shimmer of question and answer.

They’re not ready. She’s not ready.

And she does need to know the locomotive’s timeline.

She won’t be dissuaded from speaking with the mayor this time. Not by Poe Dameron, not by anyone. As an elected official— _nominally_ , her mind corrects with niggling accuracy—Armitage Hux is beholden to the will of the Sweet Springs people. He owes answers to them when they question his governing policies. His plans for the town.

It’s not as though she can be distracted as she was last time.

“Be careful when you go.” Swallowing, Rose turns to Rey now. She brushes her fingertips over the back of Rey’s hand. She doesn’t look again at Finn; she’s wiser than Rey. Letting nothing precious take root beneath her ribs that's liable only to be ripped apart. Not permitting herself to hope.

“It’s everyone else who should be careful,” Finn retorts. He waggles his eyebrows in a parody of leering laughter, as though hoping to draw Rose’s gaze again.

“Damn right.” Rey doesn’t smile. Because yes, they should be. She stands.

Yet there's a frightened piece of her that crumples and wails within her chest when Rey contemplates leaving her ranch in Finn and Rose’s care for even a half-day. They’re friendly but they’re strangers, and she hates abandoning her home to strangers’ hands.

_Strangers at the door—_

Perhaps they’re good strangers. She wants them to be. But she’s as wary of hope for herself as she is for Rose.

Still, she needs to ride to Sweet Springs. She needs to know. So the next morning, girding her gut after securing her traplines, checking her shingles and latches, and shoring up a single fallen rail from the cattle enclosure—she’ll be turning out the herd soon, now that all her pregnant cows have calved—Rey saddles Little Bee and sets off for the town.

No one waves her farewell or godspeed from her shanty’s porch; Finn and Rose will stay hidden in the barn while she’s away. But she’s given them her hatchet and butchering knife, and Rey doesn’t doubt Rose will use both with a brutal, panicked strength if attacked. If some rustler or overseer tracks them down and threatens Finn? A man like that's unlikely to make it off the ranch with all his limbs.

This thought gives Rey a grim, dark satisfaction. She doesn’t trust Rose to defend the ranch as Rey herself would, but she certainly trusts the other woman to defend Finn. It’s been almost two weeks since they took shelter from the railroad’s abuses in her storage stall, and this—of all the little things she’s gleaned about them through whispers and gestures and even plain speech—is what she knows most strongly.

So she rides away. Little Bee tosses his head with a snorting protest at the hard press of her heels to his ribs and her tight clutch on the reins.

“Sorry…” Rey loosens her grip on the leathers and softens her thighs.

Another head toss in grateful recognition for Rey’s corrections to her seat. Little Bee stretches his shoulders forward from a clipped canter to an easy, ground-covering gallop. Verdant pastures flicker past in a haze of dust. They weave between wind-carved, red-burnished pinnacles, winding along grassy slopes where sprouting trees make a hopeful rush for the sky before they’re bitten back to their roots by deer or grazing cattle. Acres melt away. All too soon, Little Bee’s hooves are kicking up gritty earth on the eastern road leading into Sweet Springs.

Rey wishes the ride were twice as long. Or shorter by half.

Anything but what it is.

“Easy now,” she murmurs to her mustang. He slackens from a hand-gallop to a trot under her coaxing fingers while Rey settles back into the saddle from her two-point position. Little Bee offers only a resigned flutter of nostrils at this curtailment of their joyous run. “I know,” Rey blows out her own breath. But there’ll be no theatrics in leaping over loosened beer barrels or scattering goats herded along to market today.

Nothing to draw attention to herself. Not now, when she knows she’s harboring fugitives.

Yet Rey’s a marked figure in Sweet Springs. Heads turn from the plank boardwalks and within glass-windowed shops as she posts down Main Street in her rancher’s hat and trousers, riding her distinctive painted horse.

 _That_ _woman_. She knows perfectly well that pretty, natty ladies in tea shops and promenading along the street are gossiping about her behind lace gloves and fans, or under the tasseled silk fringes of parasols held against the noonday sun.

 _That woman, alone on her ranch. What does she do there?_   Speculation is rife. That she’s a whore. A bandit. Or just an unruly woman, worse than either other charge.

Rey cares nothing for these opinions, rising and falling in her stirrups while she trots past on Little Bee. Can any of those dainty hands brand a calf, or skin a buffalo wolf? Fire off a shotgun with precision in the dark so that not a single slug is wasted?

No, she doesn’t care.

Why should she?

She keeps her eyes fixed directly ahead while she approaches the courthouse, reddened nape—sunburn, not embarrassment—hidden beneath her shirtwaist’s collar and her hat’s broad shadow. She’s dusted off the hat and put on a clean shirt. What more do these people want from her? To rein her mustang to a walk, balancing in a sidesaddle with a parasol raised to defend alabaster cheeks against the bright noon sky? _Ha!_ She holds Little Bee to his slow pace, rubbing the watchers’ noses in her disdain for their gossip. She’s not hurrying away from the prickling conjectures crawling along her neck. She’s not running.

Little Bee is skittish and shy beneath her tense seat, mouthing the bit as Rey’s fingers clench and release on his leathers.

But she needs to put on this show. Show them that she’s not afraid. That she has nothing to fear from the people of Sweet Springs.

Nothing hidden on her ranch, or in her heart.

There’s no well-meaning or interfering Poe Dameron to warn her off when she dismounts at the courthouse steps. No yellowing wanted posters with familiar faces to accuse or disarm her. Nothing to break her concentration as Rey strides up the risers with hard thumps from her heels. She pushes through the building’s doors, where hints of gilding still cling in the wood's crevasses from when the courthouse was Sweet Springs’ dancehall. Something about those sly, gaudy glints around bolts and hinges raises Rey’s chin and determination higher.

Because she knows the truth.

She knows this place for what it really is. Not all the polished furniture, well-scrubbed gas lamps, and sharply suited men with pince-nez or lazy cigars can convince her otherwise.

Rey’s defiant boots march up to a desk positioned just within the courthouse doors, blocking ingress into the hallowed halls and offices upstairs. A dark-haired man with unfortunate horizontal ears observes her approach until she’s standing directly before him. Her doffed hat knocks a buffed brass nameplate askew that reads _Dopheld Mitaka - Clerk to the Country Courthouse._

“Mr. Mitaka, I have an appointment with the mayor.”

A set of thin eyebrows rise.

“Does he know this?” Inquiring brown eyes framed in wire spectacles regard her with supercilious courtesy.

“Check your appointment book.”

Capping a pen with a suffering sigh through his nostrils at the presumptuousness of Rey’s trespass upon valuable time that he could’ve spent staring at the courthouse doors’ insides, Mr. Mitaka wets his thumb. He turns over gilt-edged pages from a leather appointment ledger spread in state across his desk. Rather like the dancehall doors; Rey wonders whether he’s seen the parallels. Perhaps not, with those spectacles. He has the look of a man who sees what he wants to see.

Indeed, because—

“Unfortunately, I don’t see your name listed under Mr. Hux’s one o’clock appointment, Miss…?”

“How can you tell whether my name’s there or not, if you don’t know it?”

“My apologies, Miss…?” he prompts her again.

“Ridley. Actually, it seems that no one has an appointment with Mr. Hux just now. His one o’clock is blank. If you’ll put my name down, I’ll go through.” Rey raises her own eyebrows and smiles sourly.

Having revealed his hand, the clerk has little choice but to inscribe Rey’s name in the ledger. “I’ll let him know—”

“Thank you.” Leaving Mr. Mitaka reaching for his brass-mouthed speaking tube—another relic of the building’s dancehall days, meant for passing secrets between girls without the gentlemen patrons’ knowledge—Rey sidesteps the clerk’s desk and strides up a set of plushly carpeted stairs.

Dancers used to pose on these banisters with their garters on display. Though the lusts within the courthouse are different now, its wood still bears a thousand avaricious fingerprints.

She could’ve so easily been one of those girls on parade. But for Leia Organa…

Offices on the upper floor span a hallway’s length. Rey skirts a room housing the town’s printing press—issuing testaments to fiscal and moral goods that Mr. Hux has bestowed upon the Sweet Springs community, judging from stacks of papers bound in twine outside the door and ready for distribution along Main Street. She passes a few clerks nibbling pens and cheap cigars in their shirtsleeves while conning over topographical maps, and then she comes to a last door on the hallway's left.

The mayor’s office.

The door is closed. Of course. A large and aggressively polished nameplate reads,

 _Armitage Hux - Mayor to Sweet Springs_.

And bona-fide bastard, in Rey’s not-so-humble opinion.

That door might be closed in a universal symbol for _do not disturb_ , but frosted glass panes set into its paneling hint at a dark-clad shape seated behind a desk facing the threshold. Politely waiting for her entrance? Rey thinks not, given that even the glass’s tinting can’t dim a shock of orange that is the man’s greasy hair. It’s Hux at the desk, all right.

Well, she has an official appointment. So Rey turns his doorknob and walks straight in.

“No, I will not see that woman! Whatever possessed you to make an booking—” the mayor is hissing into the fanned brass mouth of a speaking tube installed on his desk.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Hux.” Rey shuts the door behind her with a rattle, speaking loudly enough that her voice is sure to carry through that tube to the unfortunate Mr. Mitaka downstairs.

There’s a petrified squeak from the tube. Scowling, the mayor twists its horn away from his mouth. His pasty lips are so narrow as to be almost invisible against his pallid face when Mr. Hux turns with obvious distaste toward Rey. He looks her up and down, insolently appraising her and obviously gathering his thoughts.

Rey refuses to glance away from the man’s pale, reptilian gaze. She wills an angry flush to dim from her cheeks and ears. Unsuccessfully. But she stares straight back at him with teeth gritted behind her own lips. She endures.

Only after a full minute of excruciating silence does the mayor inquire, “To what do I owe this visit, Miss Ridley?” A curl in his mouth makes it very clear that Rey’s presence in his office brings him no pleasure.

The feeling is entirely mutual.

“I have questions about the railroad line,” she says at once, eager to begin and to be gone. “Concerns about its impact.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you attend the town hall I held on the subject?” Hux leans back into his creaking leather chair and steeples his fingers. The twist deepens over his lips. “Proper protocol was followed, Miss Ridley. Now, I am happy to hear your concerns, of course”— _bastard!_ Rey thinks—“but a decision has already been made for the good of the community, and with the community’s input. Insistence, really."

"Really."

“Indeed. You see, Miss Ridley, our people will have progress. This railroad line will bring prosperity and new opportunities to a town left nearly derelict by its former governance. A vote to approve tracks through the valley and to open a Sweet Springs station passed with an overwhelming majority from those in attendance at the town hall. Sadly, you were not there to make your concerns known. A pity, for I’m sure you would’ve spoken very eloquently on whatever trifles have ruffled your feathers. But the vote was taken and counted, and who am I to stand in the way of an honest vote?”

“A vote like the one that delivered you into this office?” Rey shoots back.

Hux’s ginger eyebrows lift. Brushing an invisible speck from the arm of his crisp gray suit, he doesn’t reply.

“Counted like that?” Her hands fist, fingers denting her hat’s felted brim.

“What are your concerns, Miss Ridley?” Hux sighs, his exaggerated patience plainly articulating that he thinks her nothing but a troublesome child, all her grievances imaginary. He snaps open a pocket watch and observes its second hand tick a full revolution before he tucks the case away again. “I’m obligated to hear them, as Mr. Mitaka has so kindly reminded me by scheduling you into a day when I’ve many other matters to attend to.” He nods at a neat pile of ledgers and maps stacked in the precise center of his desk, at a row of pens and inkwells glistening with industry, at legal documents with drying signatures. "So please, be concise."

_Oh!_

How she’d like to shout and rail at this odious man— _liar, cheat, immoral weasel!_ To snap his speaking tube between her bare hands. To smash the glass and frame from a mayoral certificate hanging above his desk. To shred a grainy, triumphant photograph taken beside a ballot box. But Rey grinds down the revulsion in her stomach, grinding her nails likewise into her palms. She will not act like a child before him. She’s a grown woman now.

And she hasn't come to air her grievances.

“I heard that there was some trouble on the tracks,” she says after a simmering moment. Her voice is almost calm. “My concerns are regarding bandits. For those of us living on homesteads away from the town, how can we know whether we sleep safely, if men are marauding along the railway line?”

“If you’re concerned, perhaps you should consider exchanging a claim shanty for rooms in Sweet Springs. A boarding house for single ladies is opening on Second Street.” Hux inclines his head in a parody of kind concern. “You could sell your land at a profit, certainly. Not everyone is cut out for a homesteading life, Miss Ridley. No one would think the less of you for it.”

True _._  No one would think the less of her, but only because they’d all be too busy bidding for the best acres on this side of the Mississippi.

Celebrating that they’d driven her out, broken her at last. A woman in a man’s world. A woman who refused to give up what they wanted from her, who dared to defy them.

“Not everyone’s cut out for homesteading,” Rey retorts, “but I am. I won’t sell, as I’ve told men like you before. And while your negligence is concerning, it’s unsurprising—”

“We’ve apprehended the railway culprit, Miss Ridley.”

Her belly lurches so abruptly and so hard that Rey hazards her heart may’ve jolted over her tongue. “Y-you have?”

“You may sleep safely,” he sneers.

“Who was it?” There’s no way for Hux to know about Finn and Rose hiding out on her ranch. Is there? He’s gloating, but not as much as he would be if he’d caught Rey red-handed in harboring railway deserters. If he'd dragged them off to jail. Because then he’d be in the clear with the law to take her in for questioning, drive her off her land, enforce his own notions of order on the homesteads as he already has in town—

Hux only smiles. “Why should you worry about that? Unless you had something to do with the explosion?”

“Explosion? Of course not.” She tries to speak evenly, though she can hardly hear her own voice over the pulse yammering in her ears. “So long as bandits don’t come rustling on my ranch, I’ll be pleased. In fact, I’d like to know when the train's coming. I’ll send for some supplies from back east, if they’re guaranteed to arrive in safety.”

“Assuming no further work from saboteurs, which I clearly do not expect since the culprit is in jail, the first locomotive should be arriving within a month.”

 _Clearly_ is a funny word. It means that a speaker isn’t certain of his statement at all.

“Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Hux. I won’t take any more of it. I know it’s valuable.”

Rey leaves the man fishing for a retort to her sharp courtesy. She strides out into the hall, down the stairs, past a chastened, aggrieved Mitaka at his desk, and outside to the sun-warmed courthouse steps. She’s had the parting shot with Hux, but if it’s somehow Finn or Rose behind bars—

_Breathe. Just breathe._

She’s done what she had to do. Gotten the information she needed. But she feels no triumph. Her head’s still spinning and throbbing. Her stomach hasn’t stopped its lurches against her ribs. The sensation that she’s swallowing back her heart into her chest hasn’t faded. Her pulse is thick on her tongue.

Rose and Finn must still be safe. They must be.

Rey compels herself to start walking; she’s attracting passing stares while she stands panting at the top of the courthouse steps, her eyes glazed. _Ignore their curious looks, their raking gazes from hat to boots. Ignore their linger on the swell of breasts and hips._ Breathe, and walk. Down the steps, onto the boardwalk. Along the street and away from the town’s nicer shops and offices, from the nicer folk. Walk to the derelict western outskirts where walls’ board sidings are loose and there's refuse in the gutters, Little Bee trailing at her heels, whuffling his confusion at the direction Rey's chosen—away from her ranch. Stride up to a building with barred windows and steel reinforcements on its door hinges.

The real railway culprit is in Sweet Springs’ jail.

And Rey has some questions.

Beyond those reinforced doors, the jail’s shabby front room is hot, cramped, and dim. Cork boards stuffed to overflowing with tacked-up wanted posters cover one wall. A desk propped on four wobbly legs leans against the other. It’s stifling, smelling of half-rotted paper and sour sweat. Much as she immediately wants to gag and run, Rey holds her ground. She lets her eyes adjust to the half-light and picks out a ring of iron keys hanging over that rickety desk, within easy reach for a warden. That attendant looks up at her entrance, frowning against the light she allowed into the room before the jail's doors closed behind her.

Rey refuses to dwell on the fact that this hellish place is where she’ll end up if she’s caught. She marches over to the jail's clerk as she’d approached Mr. Mitaka in the courthouse.

“Your visiting hours are clearly open,” she says.

“Uh…” the attendant stutters, frowning, befuddled, and sweating in his stuffy room. He blinks, adjusting to the goal's dimness again after the flare of light from Rey's entrance. Another blink, collecting himself. And then his eyes drift down from her face to her chest, where her shirtwaist is damp with nervous perspiration from sharing the same air as horrible Hux.

_Ugh!_

If any man looked at her like this in the streets, Rey would break his nose and plant her knee directly into his groin. But here in the jail...this warden has something she wants. Disgusted with herself and him, Rey forces her gritted teeth into smile. She clears her throat with a dainty sound when she’d rather vomit. The man’s eyes travel reluctantly back to her face.

“I have an appointment.”

“With...uh...who...I mean, whom. With whom?” He straightens his hunched, turtle-like shoulders, Adam’s apple bobbing around a limp rag of a neckerchief. He firms his mouth in what he presumably thinks is a masterful expression. He looks constipated.

“I have a stake in the railroad line. I’m happy to see the man responsible for endangering my investment behind bars. I’d like to tell him as much. Spit in his face.”

“Not a friend of yours?” A little gleam of hope sparks in the jailer’s muddy eyes. He adjusts his neckerchief. His eyes slip down beneath Rey’s chin again.

“No friend,” she says with teeth clenched behind her lips. Does she look like some bandit’s whore? “The cells are through there?” She points to a grated door on the room’s far side, its handle inset with a massive lock. But the warden’s still staring at her breasts.

Tasting blood from where she’s biting into her cheek, Rey cocks her hip against the desk to direct his attention.

“Uh...uh-huh…” The man’s fingers stutter as he reaches for his keyring, eyes now fastened on the swell of Rey’s ass in her trousers.

Sweet lord, she _hates_ this.

But it works. The jailer shuffles to his gate. He unlocks it with a resounding _clang_ that prickles alarm up Rey’s nape. She represses her shudder, channeling it instead into the corners of her mouth to momentarily crook them upward.

“Don’t stay too long,” he says, standing overly close while she edges past him across the cellblock’s threshold.

Rey twitches her mouth again in reply. She doesn’t trust herself to say anything without gagging her disgust.

The gate locks behind her.

“I’ll let you out again. I _promise_.”

Pinching her eyelids for a moment to steel herself against reacting to that lascivious threat—and to quiet her heaving belly—Rey moves away from the gate. She steps further along a narrow, dirt-floored passage. It’s worse than the front room, half-dark with its only light filtering through from the cellblock’s dim entryway. It stinks of urine, feces, old meals, and unwashed bodies. And vomit—that too, from incarcerated drunks.

But she’s not looking for one of them.

“Mrs. Organa?” she murmurs, advancing down the walkway’s precise middle to avoid hands grasping at her through disgusting cell bars. “I know it’s been a long time…”

A shuffling noise from the hall’s furthest, darkest end. An indrawn breath of surprise. “Who’s... _Rey_?” A familiar voice, cracked and dry.

“Yes.” She steps more quickly now, hurrying to a last cell on the left where liver-spotted hands clench around the cell rods. It’s the same place along a hallway that the mayor’s office stands in the courthouse. So revolting, so petty, and her guilty words stumble out, “I’m so sorry I haven’t—”

Leia Organa just smiles and shakes her head from within her cell. Hair streaked with gray, crow’s feet lining her eyes, she looks older than Rey remembers from when she’d last seen her several years before. Poe Dameron had found young Rachel Ridley on the streets and brought her to Leia, after splattering an alley with the insides of Unkar Plutt's skull. The mayor had coaxed her and seen her fed, but turned her away from the dancehall when she would’ve gone in with a garter at barely thirteen. Told her to hold onto her family, her land, things that no one could take from her…and Rey had. Once she’d seen how bad things could be in Sweet Springs for a woman alone, she’d been glad to retreat.

Everything has been taken from Leia Organa. Yet she’s somehow managed to keep her cell cleaner than the others. Her clothes are mended with countless rough seams, but her smock is respectable enough.

“I wanted—”

“I know, my dear girl.” Leia touches the backs of Rey’s twisting hands. “But there’s nothing you can do for me. I don’t want you tangling with the sheriff or Hux on my behalf.” She nods encouragingly at Rey’s shamed, quivering mouth, as though it’s Rey who needs comfort in this moment. “I’m pleased to see you so well. You’re looking after yourself?”

A dull flush crests Rey’s cheekbones. “I…I should’ve...”

“It’s all right. I know. But you’re not here for a casual talk, are you? That would be too dangerous, now. So what’s happened?”

She hates that she’s so transparent. She hates that Leia Organa isn’t even disappointed with her for coming to the jail without any intention of bettering her former protector’s situation. “I’m sorry…”

“Don’t be sorry, Rey,” Leia hushes her briskly. “And don’t shilly-shally. I doubt you have the time for that. What can I do to help?”

It’s true—she doesn’t have time. The jailer’s doubtless counting down the minutes until he can ogle her breasts again. And Finn and Rose are back on the ranch...

“There’s...there’s someone who will’ve been brought here in the last two weeks. Hux boasted he’d caught a culprit who set off an explosion on the railroad line. I need to talk to him. Or her.”

The very slightest flutter in Leia’s firm expression crinkles her eyes. “Yes,” she murmurs. Her grip tightens to the point of pain on Rey’s wrists. “He’s here. And you must get him out, however you can.”

“W-what?” Rey’s mouth drops and she inhales a full breath of the jail’s filthy humors. She coughs, baffled and blinking. Of all the responses she’d expected—

“Please, Rey.” Leia leans closer until her lips graze Rey’s ear. “Help him.”

“Who?”

“ _My son._ ” Leia's gaze shifts to a cell across the hallway and one row up. “Please,” she whispers again, and releases her hold.

_What?_

Still blinking stupidly, still baffled, her stomach's pit lurching with shock—Leia Organa has never mentioned a son, but now— _this_ —Rey withdraws and wavers across to the indicated cell. Leia’s eyes scorch the nape of her neck as she goes, pleading and desperate.

“I’m Rey…” she says uncertainly, hollowly between the cell's dim iron rods. Everything is so confused, _she_ 's so confused, and what in the sweet lord’s name is she even doing?

A man’s shape shambles to the bars. Wild eyes flare through a tangle of matted black hair. Husky and low, a familiar voice says, “I know.”

It’s Kylo Ren.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear readers, I have a request:
> 
> In the next couple of chapters, Rey is going to need a pretty, sexy dress because she [ **spoilers redacted** ]. I would love to see what _you_ think a pretty, sexy, and (relatively--1870s or 1880s) era-appropriate dress for Rey might look like. :)
> 
> So sound off in the comments, or send me some ideas on Tumblr! (My anon is on; you don't have to be a registered user.) If you're a fellow Tumblr, PM me or tag me in your images, your descriptions, your art (???)…and Rey might [ **spoilers redacted** ] with your dress!
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	13. Chapter 13

_I’m Rey._

That voice.

The arch of a freckled cheekbone, the curl of an ear, an edge of fluttering eyelashes bleached pale with exposure—specks of sunlight pick out fractured details amid the jail's squalor. _Fireflies failing to illuminate the full breadth of night._ No, brighter than that. Because she’s here. Rancher’s hat in her twisting, nervous hands with their scraped knuckles and nails bitten to the quick, sweat-stained shirtwaist clinging against her so that his mouth desiccates. As always, her hair is snarled and bunched against her damp, wilted collar.

And somehow, she’s here _._

Ren doesn’t understand. But—

“I know,” he growls, tongue dry and rasping against his teeth. He’s torn between hurling himself against his cell’s filthy bars to reach for her throat— _traitorous little whore_ —or approaching with open palms, pleading with her not to turn away. Not to run. Because she’s here, and he wishes he had a comb to drag over his matted scalp. Or a wet rag to clean the grime from his face and ears.

Not that it matters. She isn't here to see him.

He compromises by lurching up to the bars and gripping them so hard that tendons in his wrists cramp and sing, aching shocks dancing through his elbows and to his shoulders. Nearer to her. Hating her for what she’s done to him, needing to see her like he needs sunlight. _Rey_. Belly churning with intertwined and incompatible desires.

“Matth... _Ren_. Kylo Ren?” Her voice quavers and her eyebrows contract—a shadow of movement, a hint of expression.

Not enough.

Because he can’t read her. Rey's transparent features reveal her every thought, some curl in her mouth or a pinch at the corners of her eyes articulating her musings or analyses as plainly as glass, but he can’t—can’t—Ren presses closer against his bars, thrusting his jaw between them until his ears catch on the iron rods. Not close enough; she retreats across the dirt-floored passage as he advances until she strikes against an empty cell across from his. Rey freezes at the press of bars along her spine and shoulders. Still as a startled doe just before she bolts.

 _Don’t run._ Not before he knows, can accuse—

“What are you doing here?” he demands hoarsely, eardrums aching as he forces himself further still through his bars. Bruises splatter the edges of his jaw. He hasn’t spoken in what seems like days, keeping his raging silence against a cell at the end of the passageway. His throat rasps and his tongue buckles.

Well...he’s been quiet except to vociferously abuse his jailer whenever the man comes to trade his slop pail for equal slop that passes for a meal. At first, he’d thrown the stuff in the warden's face. Now he gulps down the porridge-like substance as if it’s repulsive manna; he keeps up his vicious vocal abuse on principle. A man his size can’t maintain a hunger strike for two weeks. Not if he means to be strong enough to escape. Because Ren isn’t planning on dying in this cell. Not if he can help it.

“I…” Rey stutters at him now, shaking her head so that loosened strands of hair wind down from a cobbled-together bun at her nape. “I...I came to see...someone who set off the nitroglycerin explosion on the railway line. But...that wasn’t you. It can’t have been. So why are you—”

Ren scoffs, spitting over his shriveled tongue. “You’re telling me you didn’t spill everything to Dameron when you went to Sweet Springs for the horse and morphine? Didn’t warn the sheriff about a fugitive on your ranch? Told them I was keeping you captive in your own shanty, and you’d only just escaped into town?”

Rey’s chapped mouth falls open, eyebrows contracting against his barrage. Playing innocent might suit her, but Ren knows the truth. She won’t convince him with her fawn’s eyes and her jaw dropped in affronted astonishment.

“I—what? No! I never said anything.” She gathers herself, a shiver of motion ghosting along her throat. A hard swallow. Then her frown deepens into a scowl he knows so well, and Rey's retaliatory retort batters his ears. “Actually, I denied having seen you that day. Mr. Dameron asked me straight out, and I lied. _I lied and said no._ But it seems like you got what you deserved just fine on your own without any help from me. I shouldn’t have bothered lying. I could’ve at least collected the reward!”

“Then how did Dameron and Canady know? The bastards were ready for us when we rode through!”

“ _We_? You and your gang? The Ren Seven?” Rey’s lips contort with disgust. “Ready for you while you were robbing the town? That’s why you’re in jail, isn’t it? It’s not really about the railroad at all!” She snorts, regaining confidence with hands fisted on her hips. She strides up against his cell’s bars, glaring at him. “You made that choice. I didn’t give you away. You did it to yourself by being so damn stupid!”

“Or you’re such a poor liar that Dameron saw right through you!”

“Is that my fault?” she sneers.

Rey really is a terrible liar. That clear, expressive face reveals everything crossing behind her eyes—anger, trepidation, fear, treachery. _Confusion. Desire._ Her choices, her worries. But she’s not expressing a single tell while she snarls at him between the cell's wrought iron rods. Nothing a master poker player could use to judge what cards she keeps in hand. Bluffing, or triumphant. If she’s lying about her involvement with his capture, Ren’s damn sure she’ll reveal something.

He watches while she rants, while she fumes, waiting for that tell...

But she doesn’t give it. There's nothing.

Even in this poor light, she’s just Rey. Straight-shooting, angry, offended Rey.

Which means...

She wasn’t involved. Really. She can’t have been. Gave him away with her lying to the bastard Dameron, likely enough. But she hadn’t meant to.

_I never said anything. I denied having seen you that day._

“Why? Why didn’t you tell them about me?” It’s a stupid question. He won’t like her answer if Rey’s determined to be cutting and ornery. But the coiling in his gut demands a reply, anyhow. Because if she didn’t tell Dameron or Canady—

Rey scoffs and flaps a hand. “I tried to hide you.”

“Damn fine job you did,” Ren shoots back sharply against other words spilling across his tongue. Dangerous words.

“No. This is on you. You got yourself caught. And you...you’re acting like I’m the one who’s lying about this, but you’ve always lied to me—”

“What am I lying about now?” He pounds a fist against his bars, knuckles splitting open as though they’re overripe fruit. Blood leaks over his hands.

“You didn’t tell me you were Leia Organa’s son!”

Ren barks out harsh, disbelieving laughter. Anything to keep back those other words, because _I never said anything. I tried to hide you._ “So I didn’t tell you. It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t important, so I never said anything. And it’s still not important!”

“Lying by omission—”

“Then you’re as guilty as I am! Like how in hell you know _her_ —”

“It’s none of your business! But _this_ , this is my business, Kylo Ren. _This matters._ This changes how I feel about—” Rey chokes off with a guffaw of her own. “But I don’t suppose that’s your real name, either. Is it?”

“Please,” comes Leia Organa's dry, familiar voice from down the passage, always sounding as though she’s on the verge of exasperation or laughter. Hairs on Ren's nape rise. “Would I saddle a child with a name like that?”

“I just…” Rey flaps the hand holding her hat again, the gesture including Leia Organa in a conversation where she shouldn’t get a single damn word in edgewise. “This is...I didn’t expect this. Neither of you ever mentioned...”

“I take it you know each other,” Leia says. Ren swears he hears her eyebrows lift, posed in the same attitude of skeptical interest with which she’d always looked on his childhood misdeeds. It makes him want to punch through the wall of her best papered parlor all over again.

But—

“Not really,” he and Rey mutter at the same time, in the same repressive whisper that’s comprised their entire turbulent, sibilant conversation.

He’s in danger of being reduced to ash by a glance from scorching hazel eyes, as Rey continues,

“I thought I knew him. But I knew him as _Matthew_.”

“ _Matthew_?” Leia sighs. “Really, you’ll use anything but your given name. But Rey,” her murmur becomes suddenly brisk and business-like, “whatever he’s calling himself, you must help him escape this place. Please. He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me. It's my fault. Because this is a game of Hux's. He's looking for leverage by threatening my son on trumped-up charges carrying a hanging penalty, since robbery doesn’t. He's trying to grind me down and break me, when I haven't given him the satisfaction in all the years I've endured this cell. My son’s only a pawn in Hux's game. He may not be innocent, but this is my battle. He’s not involved.”

The _hell_?

Too stunned to voice any of the thousand rebuttals echoing within his skull, Ren just stands silent at his bars. All this...Leia Organa’s fault...he wants it to be true, he really does. But he’s not sure he believes it. So he waits, seething at her new trick.

“Hmm.” Rey looks him up and down, cocking her head. It’s an unflattering appraisal of his matted hair, his wild growth of a beard merging over his cheeks to his hairline. His tattered, filthy clothes. Ren grits his teeth against an angry color rising into his ears.

She says, “He looks fairly normal to me.”

“Only because Hux has a fetish with the law. But due process won’t stall him for long. Rey, please.”

“I don’t need you to organize my jailbreak,” Ren snaps when Rey continues to observe him with a tilted head and a little moue in her mouth. As though he’s something sticky and rotten from the Sweet Springs gutter that she can’t scrape off her boot.

“Keep your voice down. Rey?”

“I…” Tendrils of hair scatter across her cheekbones. “I...I don’t know. I need to think. I'm grateful to you, and I want to help you, Mrs. Organa, but this...”

“Don’t take too long.” Ren hears in Leia's cracked but honeyed voice how hard she’s working to smile, to coax and cajole. The same voice that maneuvered Sweet Springs’ residents into voting for a woman. When she speaks this way, it’s damn difficult for anyone to resist her.

But Rey’s made of stern stuff.

“I’ll think about it,” is all she says.

Rey strides back toward a barred door leading into the jail’s front room, toward pure air and tantalizing sunlight. She doesn’t look over her shoulder, though Ren watches her all the way up the dim passage. He sees her knock on the grate to be let out. Sees the hunched jailer’s face crack into a leer, yellow teeth looking gray in the brighter light. Sees the door swing open. Sees Rey pass the man with a shudder at his hands lingering too close to her hips and ass. Sees the gate clang shut again, locked behind her.

Then she’s gone.

_Damn it, damn it, damn it!_

“Why did you have to be so difficult with her, Ben?” Leia sighs as though she's read his mind, picked out the loathing and fury boiling in his head and through his stomach’s pit.

Ren doesn’t answer. He’s ignored her attempts to talk to him for weeks, and he’s not about to quit his silence now. Nothing’s changed. Just because Rey—

“She’s a good girl. A dear girl. I believe I can persuade her to help you. But if I'm going to get you out of here, you need to tell me what happened. Tell me what occurred between the two of you so I don’t stumble onto something that’ll make her skittish. Tell me how you know each other.”

Ren thunks himself down onto his narrow, sour-smelling cot. He turns his back on Leia Organa’s wheedling voice. _No, no, no._ His hands are shaking, reopening the tacky, forming scabs on his knuckles. He buries his palms between his thighs, clamping down his legs to still them.

“Ben…”

_No._

“Then I’ll simply have to hope that Rey sees sense when you won’t.” Another sigh. “You’re so like your father.”

He almost bellows a denial on pure instinct—almost _._ _You have no idea what I’m like!_ But reacting like that will just give her what she wants. So Ren keeps silent, gritting his teeth into his lip against a temptation to shout. Staring at his cell's mud-bricked wall ordinarily sends him into a comatose boredom where her voice can’t needle him; he stares as fiercely as he can, blocking his ears with apathy's dull, heavy hum.

“She’s hurt, Ben. You won’t have meant to hurt her, and I see that clearly. But I think you have. Yet it’s not a bad thing, because you can fix this. You can, if you’ll only talk to her instead of yelling.”

Like _hell._

Glaring at the wall until his eyes burn isn’t working. That name, the tenderness of it on her lips—it goads and prickles the undersides of his eyelids, itching worse than his dead-fish stare at the bricks. It’s the same tenderness with which she persisted in speaking to him as a boy, even after he’d disappointed her somehow. He hates it. That gentleness, holding her true emotions locked away. He hates that Leia Organa can seem to love so much after everything she’s done. As though loving absolves her from guilt.

It doesn’t. It really fucking doesn’t.

“You don’t have to talk to me, Ben. But if Rey comes back, talk to her. She’s your only chance of getting out of here, sweetheart. Don’t throw that opportunity away for your pride.”

 _Pride?_ She thinks this is about pride? Well, she doesn’t get to tell him what he feels. Because this thing clogging his throat with an angry heat—isn’t pride.

Eyes searing beneath their lids, it takes Ren several days of watching his cell’s wall to name the tight, knotted clench under his ribs. It’s not as though he has much else to distract him, beyond the inarticulate howls of several incarcerated drunks at the hallway’s near end. They’re dragged in every evening without fail, their cells a piss- and sick-drenched home.

_Causing a ruckus. Disturbing the peace._

He finds the word while seeking a release within his fist on the second night's passing since Rey strode up to his cell. Since she left him here. Spend pulsing through his fingers while Ren muffles a groan into the cell’s stale mattress, he feels it rise onto his tongue.

 _Rejection_.

Which is a cunt of a feeling. No one rejects Kylo Ren. He takes what he wants.

He takes everything he wants.

Except Rey.

It's then that Ren learns he wants Rey to stand before his filthy bars again. To come back to him. He wants to tell her...things. Some things. Not everything, but enough.

Not so that she’ll break him out of jail—a delusion from Leia Organa that’s as unlikely to happen as a blue harvest moon—but so that she’ll know. She’ll know he’s grateful for the morphine. He is, though its empty bottle was confiscated with his other belongings; he's endured the ache of his unsplinted leg while stone-cold sober. But he hardly limps when pacing his cell, now. The ache’s dull in his bones, yet his gratitude hasn’t dimmed.

She’ll know that he’s grateful for everything else.

But Rey doesn’t come back.

He doesn’t want to hope, ears pricking with every rustle of movement in the corridor beyond his cell. He can’t help it. Hour after hour. Disappointment from squeaking rats, drunks’ dribbling vomit, and the warden’s flatulence guts him so brutally that he even takes to listening to Leia Organa when she talks. Anything, just to drown out the whispering urgency inside his head.

Anything’s better than hoping.

“I’m sorry, Ben,” she says after he’s lost count of the days he’s been in his cell—but three days since Rey strode down the jail’s dirty passageway, smelling of sweat and worry and also of sunlight. “I’m sorry…”

Her voice is an endless whisper, a wind across the lowlands that echoes forever and nowhere at once. Ren hates the way her words crawl inside him and stick under his ribs. But he listens to strangle his own hope with Leia Organa’s despair.

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t be the mother you needed when you needed me. I failed you. I failed you by sending you away, and by not coming after you when you left. I’m sorry for it. I’m sorry that you hate your name. I’m sorry I didn’t listen hard enough to all the things you didn’t say, when there was still time. I’m sorry I can’t help you now, when there isn’t.”

_She’s sorry._

Well, she has things to be sorry for. So many goddamn things. Ren nearly tells her this—but stops himself with teeth clamped into his lips. He won’t give her the satisfaction of speaking, not even to berate her for all the ways she’s failed him. _Failed. Leia Organa, a failure._ Because—

 _Anger isn’t the opposite of love, Ben,_ she’d told him after he'd witnessed a plate-hurling, screaming row between his parents. He’d been coming home from the schoolhouse one afternoon, thinking about triangles or how frogs laid their eggs, and he’d walked straight into the kind of fight that broke windows and furnished a month of gossip for neighbors at their quilting bees. Horrified and scared, he’d hidden upstairs, hunching under his bed with arms around his knees, rocking and rocking on floorboards that never quite got dusted. Trying not to cry.

She’d come to find him, to stroke his hair and murmur nonsense in place of comfort or explanation. _Indifference is the opposite of love,_ she’d said. _If you can be angry with someone, it means that you care. Like your father and I. We love each other, Ben, and sometimes all that love makes people angry. People can say and do things that are wrong in the heat of a moment, but it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other. Because anger’s just love seen through a reversed telescope, like the one Miss Ingalls uses to show you the sky in school. Just the other side of a coin._

He’d nodded like he’d understood, to please her. She’d smiled, tired lines fanning around her eyes even then. _Better to feel something, than nothing at all._

Ren uses Leia Organa's own counsel against her. He stays quiet.

“I want you to know that I was trying to protect you. Through all of it, I thought I could help by being strong. If I could only be strong enough...but I couldn’t. Sending you to Luke made things worse. If I could—”

But a jailer unlocks the grated door with their daily porridge slop, then. Leia falls silent. Her silence lasts. For hours after the warden's left them alone to eat, then taken away their clean-scraped bowls, even when the man won’t overhear her if she speaks softly, she doesn’t disturb their quiet. Perhaps she’s given up in the face of Ren’s obstinate refusal to respond. Or she’s waiting for the endless cycles of hope and disappointment to break him.

Shivering at night in his cell—much colder than the unchinked shanty—with his cot’s ratty blanket barely covering his torso, Ren wonders whether she’ll have long to wait.

Sheriff Canady comes to see him five days after Rey walked off and left Ren behind.

“You’ll have your trial in six days' time,” the pot-bellied, balding man sneers. “The verdict’s certain for robbery. Good of you to leave those posters behind for a tally. Should’ve done the same on the railway line after your blast. Would’ve made that outcome equally certain, but it’s sure enough. Preference for a noose or a firing squad?”

Ren does his best to spit in defiance, but his mouth’s too dry to muster up even a lick of moisture.

“It won’t come to that,” Leia promises him after Canady’s gone, the man rubbing his hands with satisfaction. “Rey will come back, sweetheart.”

And if she doesn’t?

A bright, dire ring of hammers sounds at noon in the goal’s squalid rear courtyard. Ren chokes over his spoonful of gray sludge. Industry like this near the cells only means one thing: gallows.

They haven’t even taken his preferred method of execution into account.

Because with the strangulation and bulging, bugging eyes, bowels voided before a grimly cheerful crowd while his feet dance the hemp fandango, he’d definitely prefer a firing squad.

Cleaner, more dignified. A better end for Kylo Ren.

 _Quicker, too_ , a cowardly instinct whispers. He’s already felt his leg break, the excruciating snap and grind of sundering bone; he has no desire to repeat the harrowing experience for his neck.

Although breaking his spine will likely be less painful than slow, lingering strangulation while his knees and ankles jerk into nothingness.

If Rey doesn’t come back...

The jail’s grated door unlocks on the ninth day, three days before his trial and two days since the hammers finished their work in the courtyard. Ren can’t stamp down a treacherous bloom of hope in his chest, even while he keeps his eyes fixed on the midday slop he’s mechanically eating. Enjoying this putrid mush for as many days as he has left. It’s not her. It’s never her.

Except that it is.

“I have questions,” Rey says without preamble, stepping straight to Leia's cell and past Ren without a glance. “The crimes on Kylo Ren’s wanted posters, Mrs. Organa: is he guilty?”

A harsh, indrawn breath of astonishment at this abrupt visitation, at the syllables hissing from Rey’s lips. But Leia Organa collects herself as quickly as she’s always done. She says, “No. The posters are all lies, Rey.”

And just like that, a stammer leapfrogs over Ren’s tongue before he can swallow it back.

“ _What?_ ”

Rey’s shoulders twitch, but she doesn’t turn. “Why?”

“Because I wanted to protect him.”

“You tried to protect me by advertising for my body, dead or alive—”

Leia ignores him, joining her hands with Rey’s around her cell’s bars. Rey, whose figure thrums with nervous energy so that she clings to the corroded iron rods for balance.

“He’s not an innocent man. I won’t lie to you about that, Rey. But he’s not guilty of the crimes on his poster. I printed them while I held Sweet Springs’ mayoral office. I printed the most heinous things I could imagine. And I offered a very small reward.”

“What the _hell_ —”

“I did it because I was afraid. I was afraid someone would hunt him down for what he’d done in Sweet Springs. He was a boy. But if bounty hunters were wary of chasing him because of the unspeakable atrocities he’d already committed so young, if they had little incentive to track him for a tiny sum and risk their own skins...then perhaps he could run from his past. Be safe.”

“ _You said dead or alive!_ ”

“That’s the standard language, yes. I created the posters, Rey. If the listed crimes are anyone’s, they’re mine for imagining them into existence. Terrible things. Things I carry with me, evidence of a capacity for horror that we all bear. Because if I could even conceive of these acts...They’re things I’ve done to my own son. Forcing him to bear those crimes as stains upon a name he chose for himself. To keep him safe. But there was no price too high for that. I would pay a higher cost gladly, if it would free him.”

“No—no, you didn’t make them up. They’re what Luke—”

“No, sweetheart.” Finally, Leia glances aside from Rey to where Ren pounds impotently against his bars, raging and incoherent with denial, bloodying his knuckles again and again. “Luke never spoke to me about anything that happened between you.”

“No, no, that’s a lie, he told you—made you believe—”

Her hair catches the jail’s light with a weary silver gleam when Leia shakes her head. Her eyes swivel back to Rey, always focused on something or someone else. Anything but her son. “Rey, will you help us?”

Rey...Rey bows her chin, exposing mats at the nape of her neck. Vulnerable, tired. Weighed down with Leia Organa’s barrage of guilt and confession—sincere or not, Ren doesn't know. And she’s deciding. With her face lowered into shadow, he can't trace out her thoughts, can't glean any hint of which way she'll choose.

But then—

“You told me the truth,” she mutters. Head still hanging, eyes hidden beneath their lids, she turns from Leia to address them both together. “You lied about so many things, but you told me the truth about what you’d done, Ren. And I know that you didn’t set charges along the railway track. You couldn’t have. I believe you’re guilty of more than I know, but not of this.”

She pauses. Ren wills Leia not to interrupt that silence. Rey's thinking, considering silence. Making a final choice between options. His breath stutters. He only just remembers to inhale before his mind edges toward fading gray.

“So I’ll help you. As much as I can without endangering myself or mine. Because you don’t deserve a scaffold. At least, not for this.”

Leia sighs, gusty with relief. “Thank you, my dear. Now, we’ve less than—”

“No. The less you know, the better. We shouldn’t have talked even this much. Whispering can be overheard. I won’t come again until it’s time.”

“When?” Leia’s fingers clutch her bars. She leans against them without regard for the rods’ filthy state. “Hux may not hang a noose directly after the trial, but it won’t be long after.”

“When I’m ready.”

The grated door between their cells and the jail’s front room swings shut and locks. Leia swears under her breath with an inventiveness that surprises Ren. Her nails rake along her cell’s bars in a wincing screech. Then, “Rey's a sweet girl, but she’s also the most infuriating—the most absolutely, ridiculously stubborn—”

There don’t seem to be words enough in the English language for Leia Organa to adequately vent her frustration. Or her relief.

Much as he hates to admit common ground with her, Ren has to agree.

Hot and cold, sweet and sour, and so damnably pretty and aggravating that he wants to pound his head against his cell's brick wall. At least he’d stand a chance of purging Rey from inside his skull, then.

“And you like her.”

“I... _what?_ ”

“I’m your mother, Ben. I _know_. Something happened between the two of you.”

“Nothing happened. Nothing!” Shaving beside the river—it was nothing. A touch, a loss.

Everything he can’t have.

“You’re angry with her because you wanted more than she gave.”

“I’m not—I _don’t_ —”

“There’s no one to impress with how little the mighty Kylo Ren cares, Ben. Just me. Well, and Malcolm and Steven up the way. But they’re certainly too drunk to overhear, or to remember if they do. What happened?”

He’s not going to tell her. Why should he? But words spill out anyhow, because he's weak and he can’t stop himself. And because he’s had no one to tell about what really happened on the ranch. What happened to him.

“I broke my leg,” Ren starts, syllables short and clipped while he’s still trying to force them back, to control himself. “She set it. I left.”

“With a broken leg? No. That’s not what happened.”

“Fine! She found me when I’d snapped my leg after my horse fell down that eastern ridge outside Sweet Springs. I was coming back west, but I...I wasn’t coming home. I wasn't. She set the bone and kept me on her ranch while I healed. But only because she was worried about lawmen claiming she’d shot an innocent man. Worried they'd drag her off her land. Take her to this place. She couldn't look after her cattle herd from a cell. So she kept me there. It was a month before I could walk.”

“During that month?”

“I stayed on the ranch.”

“You liked it there.”

“No. It was boring as hell, and she’s not much for company—”

“The Ben I know could’ve gotten away if he’d wanted to,” she says. “You were always good at playing hiding games. At running. But you stayed.”

“You try escaping with a broken leg!”

She laughs, a dry huff in her throat. “Yes, it would’ve been difficult. Dangerous, too. But when did that ever deter you from doing something you wanted to do, sweetheart?”

“Don’t you dare say—”

“That wasn’t my intention.” Leia pauses for a moment while they both catch their breaths. Speaking together again is damn exhausting. Navigating the conversation. Carefully, so carefully. Then she clears her throat and resumes, “But you stayed with her. You didn’t tell her the truth about the posters. About Kylo Ren.”

“I tried.” Ren’s whisper cracks. He hates the weakness in his chest, in his throat, but he can't master it. “I used another name while I was with her. It was safer. She was a stranger with a shotgun. But when I eventually tried to tell her who I was...she drove me away.”

“When you wanted to stay.”

She won’t believe any denial he gives. She’s already decided who he is and what he feels, just as she always has done. So Ren doesn’t answer. And he’s tired. So tired. He slumps against his bars.

Leia hums in her throat when his forehead droops and strikes the rods. She murmurs, “These aren't the circumstances I would've chosen, but I’m very glad to see you again, Ben. I’m glad you’ve come back, though you should’ve stayed away. And I’m so glad that you’ll talk to me. Even if you’re angry.”

Ren _hmph_ s, dragging himself back to his cot. _Anger_. Another jab about how he can't stop caring. He doesn’t care. But she won’t believe this, either.

“I figured you would’ve talked your way out of this place already,” he grunts, punching at his threadbare mattress to coax a softer configuration from its moldy straw filling. “That you wouldn’t need help from anyone.”

Leia laughs, gravelly but hushed. “Perhaps not when I was younger. But you left Sweet Springs when you were barely more than a boy. I’ve grown old in that time. And I’ve learned that some things are better borne than fought. Or at least, I’ve learned to be patient enough to fight at the right time.”

“And this is your right time?” Ren pummels his straw.

She sighs. “I hope so. With Rey, I hope so.”

“How’d you even end up in a cell? You were the mayor, with everyone in town fawning right up until...and then—”

Another laugh, another sigh.

“Yes, those were golden days. Or I thought they were, while they lasted. I didn’t realize how I was neglecting you and your father at the time. Perhaps I didn’t want to see. Well, a clever young man named Armitage Hux saw. He also saw an opportunity. A woman out of her place, her family in disarray. Only look at what happens to sons when their mothers move beyond the sphere of the home, into public life! Oh, he was full of worry and rationale.

“And the house and land were in your father’s name. If I’d only taken his surname when we signed the marriage registry...but I hadn’t. I was so certain it didn’t matter. That when we traveled west away from the seaboard cities, there would be no conventions to hold me back. But Hux found legal tenants requiring those taking public office to be landholders free and clear. There was no land in Sweet Springs with _Organa_ on the deed. It still might’ve blown over with the right words. After all, laws can and have been changed. If there hadn't been trouble in the town just then—”

Trouble with gangs. Ren’s gang. The first Ren Seven, roughriders and troublemakers. Boys without a sense of consequence.

Leia doesn’t say this, but he knows.

“Yet we did. People grew nervous about damage to their property. About vandalism. How could a woman with no holdings of her own understand these concerns? And then Hux offered a very precise kind of order that spoke to their worries over lawlessness. Precedent, and extreme punishment for wrongdoing to serve as an example. A deterrent. Since I held no property in my own name and was reckoned a disturber of the peace when I spoke out against him, I was remanded here. I was guilty of the crimes laid on my name, of course. And so I remain.”

Leia Organa also doesn’t say that if Ren and his juvenile gang hadn’t terrorized Sweet Springs with their petty window breaking and thefts, with their assault on the bank, opening the way for Hux to weasel up a path to the mayoral office on legal terms and judiciously stoked fear, she wouldn’t be in a jail cell.

She doesn’t say that it’s Ren’s fault.

There’s no accusation at all in her words.

But he knows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I just learned about a work trip that's happening next week...which means that there won't be a RESS update next Sunday because of jet-lag and real life. :( But we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming after that!
> 
> (Argh, yet again behind with answering comments...I've received so many lovely images and suggestions for Rey's dress, so thank you all! I should be getting to my inbox next week. <3)
> 
> This chapter could've been called _That Awkward Moment When_ , because pretty much everything that happens fits that title. :P
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so much for all of the absolutely stunning suggestions for Rey's dress! Ultimately, I elected to modify [this one](https://lillygish.tumblr.com/post/175315939378/sartorialadventure-american-or-european-dinner) a bit and pop her into it for shenanigans. ;) 
> 
> A huge thank you also to @liquidschwarrtz for actually drawing the gorgeous, gorgeous outfit seen in the [center here](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/post/178620489885/holy-moly-folksive-been-absolutely-floored-by) for our girl!

Some of Rey’s madness leaves her when she steps back into the sunlight outside the jail. She gasps her relief at the street’s air, gritty on her tongue with dust and malodorous with gutter refuse. Almost pure after the stifling, sickening miasma in the Sweet Springs prison cells.

Some madness. But not all.

Enough that she whispers to herself, “Oh, sweet lord, what have I done?”

And then strides off in search of Poe Dameron.

Muzzle nodding against her shoulder, Little Bee follows Rey back up the road as they leave the jail's sour, despairing stench behind. They return to Main Street's comparatively clean bustle after several abstracted minutes, where Rey stumbles over her own feet and mumbles into her lips. The mustang snorts, sidestepping around a potbellied pig that’s making a dash for freedom—either from some little girl’s loving arms or from the butcher. He thunks Rey hard with his poll.

“Yes, I know it isn’t a good idea.” She halts and glares at Little Bee, fisting her hands on her hips. “But if you’re going to be a nuisance and put up a fuss, I’ll ride into town on Millie next time.”

The mustang blinks reproachfully at her. _Overly harsh_ , his whuffle implies.

“So be good, and I won’t leave you on the ranch.”

Another snort. Resigned. He bobs his head. Little Bee walks on with the resolve of a devoted, world-weary dog when Rey strides off again.

“Thank you.”

Finding Poe Dameron in Sweet Springs is never much of a challenge. All Rey has to do is listen through a din of passing carts, protesting or ill-tempered goats, and shopkeepers hawking their merchandise to suss out gales of pitchy, breathless laughter. _Giggles_. Dameron will nearly always be at the center of that female laughter, entertaining women young and old with mildly risque jokes or teasing, winking eyes over bright teeth. Since the dancehall’s been reconditioned into a courthouse, Rey heads for the town's saloons instead. Before Hux converted most bars to temperance meeting houses or out-work clerking offices, she would’ve had to walk the full length of Main Street, stopping at each entryway and tilting her head to catch the tenor of merriment inside.

Now there’s only one saloon remaining on the main road and another behind—even Mayor Armitage Hux couldn’t have exorcised all of Sweet Springs’ vices without causing a riot.

Rey walks up to the Main Street saloon. She peers in through a set of swinging doors with arched wooden tops, their laths splintered from a few ricocheting bullets or scratched by whiskey bottles hurled in a fight. Relics of past days. There's no laughter inside that dim room, just alcohol-fueled argument with voices raised on both sides of a question. Discussing the railroad.

Much as she’d like to stay and eavesdrop, to gather what words she can and turn them to advantage, Rey passes on from Hatter’s Saloon to the Cantina. This bar off Main Street serves as a general watering hole for everyone without a shop or office in the better part of town; its clientele would be less than welcome in Hatter's. Any bullet marks in the Cantina's doors are fresh. As she edges down an alley and approaches this second saloon, there’s a crash and a shout ahead that has her reaching instinctively for her shotgun sheathed on Little Bee’s saddle. A man is tossed out over the Cantina’s steps and into the street. Rey draws up with her hand on the gun’s stock, ready to shoot or run.

Confused, too. Because—

The man lands on his ass with spread legs in the dirt, roaring with laughter. “That’s how you do it, boys!” He dusts himself off and walks straight back into the Cantina—to unmistakable applause. “Gettin’ thrown outta Hatter’s is half the fun.”

_Oh._

Shaking her head at this good-natured lunacy, easing her grip on her shotgun, Rey clicks her tongue for Little Bee. He follows her from the alley, where she drops his reins in the street outside the Cantina. Then Rey straightens her hat and shoulders. Patting the mustang's neck for luck, she follows the applauded man into the saloon.

It takes her eyes a few moments to adjust to the Cantina’s half-darkened room from a sting of bright, hard sunlight refracting off the street’s packed dirt outside—but after her hours in the jail, she acclimates quickly enough. A sweeping glance finds the saloon’s exits and scouts for danger: rickety tables where amber drinks and cards are drunk and played, stools at a dingy bar beneath a wall of liquors and a mildew-speckled mirror, all the patrons bare-headed out of respect for a tiny, wizened woman standing on a stepladder before her wares, observing the cheerful ruckus with a wide, toothless smile under enormous spectacles thicker than stove lids.

Maz Kanata. A fearsome fixture in Sweet Springs, a woman who’s withstood Hux’s rise to power when even Leia Organa couldn’t weather the storm. She may only be a shade over five feet tall, but her legends loom large. She’s the fastest quick-draw this side of the Mississippi. No one challenges Maz Kanata on her turf.

And the Cantina is her turf.

Maz’s huge, magnified eyes find Rey where she stands on the threshold. Rey hastily swipes off her rancher’s hat. She ducks her head, scalp prickling while the ancient woman assesses her, susses her out, ferrets for her secrets...remembers. She only breathes normally when Maz's attention swivels away to reprimand a man seated at a table in the Cantina’s furthest corner, who’s apparently cheated too egregiously at cards for her liking. Then Rey edges along the saloon’s paneled wall, scanning for Dameron’s figure and ears cocked for breathy laughter.

 _Yes_ —there at the bar under Maz’s keen gaze. Surrounded by a fluttering crowd of women, some old, some young, some whores, and some who might even sit in the church's back pews on Sunday. All charmed. Even in the saloon’s dim light, his hair gleams with chestnut curls. A roguish glint flashes in Dameron’s eye. He’s toasting one women on his right while a friendly hand rests just above the ass of another on his left. His head’s tilted back with laughter, and he’s winking at still a third woman further down the bar. In his element.

He won’t welcome her interruption.

Rey pushes through the adoring throng and raps him smartly on the shoulder with her hat. “Dameron.”

To his credit, Poe Dameron neither spills his neat whiskey nor drops his smile. He turns a little too quickly with a very slight narrowing of his eyes—but these are the only startled tells he betrays before he claps a hand over Rey’s intrusive hat in greeting.

“Sweetheart!”

“I need to talk to you.”

Dameron’s momentarily fingers contract at her low-voiced urgency, but then he laughs. “Join the queue, love. Darlings, you know Miss Ridley?” He kisses his right-hand partner’s cheek and pats an ass or two, coaxing good-natured squeals and swats from his friends. “We’re having the most marvelous time, aren’t we, girls?”

What he means is, _be patient._

So Rey tries. Braced on her elbows against the bar, overly aware of Maz Kanata’s eyes tracing her face again, finding resemblances to an innocent, ignorant girl who once came to Sweet Springs and needed her help...Rey hates it. But if she shields herself from that excavating gaze by putting on her hat, she’ll only draw more attention to her presence in the Cantina. Rey holds herself still with gritted teeth and doesn’t flinch.

Finally— _finally_ —Dameron extricates himself from his admirers. He saunters over to where Rey waits for him with nervous, half-moon dents in her palms from her nails. Long-lashed eyes trail after him with resigned disappointment as he leaves his bevy, slightly curious over Rey’s allure: a grimy face and snarled hair. Hands primp curled fringes and pinch roses into cheeks. But in their pretty clothes with their clean faces and ears, none of these women can possibly feel that she’s much of a threat. Their curiosity passes on soon enough. Only Maz Kanata continues to observe Rey and Dameron.

“What is it?” the gunslinger asks, eyes flitting down to Rey's fisted hands. “Sweetheart, what are you doing here? Top me off, Maz, please,” he calls loudly, indicating his empty glass. “And one for Miss Ridley.”

“I don’t want a drink.”

“No. But play the game, Rey.” Dameron makes small chatter with patrons at nearby tables and with Maz, who ignores him while she pours out their drinks, her eyes rolling fondly. Only when they each have a small whiskey glass before them and Dameron has smacked satisfied lips at the liquor's taste—he hasn’t taken a single sip—does he hitch his chin at Rey.

“I need your help,” she starts in at once.

“Mmm.” Dameron rolls a tongue over his lower lip again, as though savoring the whiskey. “With what?”

Better to be direct. She’s a terrible liar, as Ren’s kindly reminded her. There’s no way to sugar-coat her request. And she doesn't have time.

“I need to break someone out of jail.”

Another hum from Dameron, but he takes a hard gulp of his whiskey, too. Steadying himself, thinking. “Glad I didn’t agree out of hand. Who is it?”

But...in this very particular instance...with this very particular question...circumspection will serve her a little better. She hopes. Given what Rey’s heard from Poe Dameron about Kylo Ren, there’s no love lost between them. So:

“Leia Organa,” she says. “I want to break Leia Organa out of jail.”

Dameron expels a fine spray of his drink across the bar. Maz tosses him a rag, which Dameron catches out of the air without taking his dilating eyes from Rey. He wipes up the spillage, nodding for her to raise her untouched drink so he can clean a whole section of the counter with unnecessary thoroughness. Thinking again.

“You...want to jailbreak Leia Organa,” he murmurs at last, when the bar’s dingy wood gleams almost as brightly as his glinting hair. Maz snaps her fingers. He lobs the rag back to her. “Mrs. Organa’s been in a cell for years. Why now?”

“I went to see her.” Close to the truth.

“She asked you to break her out?”

“No.”

“No-o,” Dameron agrees slowly, spinning his emptied whiskey glass between his fingers. “She’s too proud for that.”

Rey grabs the wobbling glass before he knocks it off the bar. “You asked?”

“I offered. She turned me down.” He takes back his glass and emphatically upends it. “Why will she accept help from you?”

“I didn’t offer.” Rey traces out a thin rim of moisture from Dameron’s swiping with the rag. “She asked.”

“She asked _you_ to jailbreak her.” Disbelief, and a slight hint of affront.

Rey swirls her amber liquor without meeting his gaze. _Tempting_. The liquor’s very tempting just now. But she knows what happens when she drinks, so she refrains. She just has to figure out how to tell him…

But Dameron’s quick—quicker on the uptake than Rey is at diplomacy.

“She didn’t ask you to jailbreak her, did she?” he says, watching her nervous fingers. Rey stills herself, but it’s too late. “She asked you to jailbreak her son.”

“You _knew_?” She sucks a hard breath since she can’t twitch her fingers again.

“It wasn’t a secret, not back in the days before Hux took office. Just one more angle he worked to oust her.” Dameron’s mouth makes an ugly knot. “But we pretended not to know after Ren...well, those of us who supported her, we pretended not to know. It hurt her too much to see when we knew the truth.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this!”

“Keep your voice down, sweetheart. I didn’t tell you because there wasn’t a reason for you to know. But I was worried when I suspected you might’ve seen him—”

“I said I hadn’t—”

“Which was obviously a lie, Rey. If he was nearby, returning with another ten years of crimes to his name—”

“He hasn’t done those things.” Rey's whisper spits and hisses between her teeth. “They’re lies, the crimes on his poster. Mrs. Organa wrote them all.”

“Is that how she convinced you to break him out?” Dameron’s lips soften a very little. “Don’t you think she might’ve been telling you what you wanted to hear?”

“Why would she lie?”

“To guilt you into helping her, confessing like that. If you think he’s innocent—”

“I know he is. At least of setting off the railway explosion.”

Dameron crosses his arms, tilting back on his stool. “How?”

“Because…” Rey eyes the stool’s precarious balance. She doesn’t want to admit this...but her truth now might be the only way to convince Dameron to help her. “Because he was on my ranch when the explosion happened. He was with me.”

“ _With—_ ” Dameron throws up his hands in a dramatic gesture that overbalances his seat. He staggers, then crashes to the floor as his tilted stool overturns—as it’s been bound to do.

A flicker of unkind satisfaction licks the inside of her ribcage when Rey tells him, “Don’t make a scene, Dameron.”

“I’m not making a…” Grimacing, the gunslinger rights himself and his seat. “Fine. But this is insane, Rey. You know that, right? Breaking anyone out of jail when Hux is on edge, least of all Kylo Ren.”

“Which is why I need your help. Please.” And then, praying that it’ll be enough, Rey plays her trump card. “A jailbreak would humiliate Hux. Show that he’s not really bringing order to Sweet Springs if things like this happen on his watch. It’ll show that he’s vulnerable. That his promises or policies—or whatever he’s calling them—aren't helping. That they're wrong.”

Trump card: because Rey knows why Poe Dameron isn’t in Hatter’s, the Main Street saloon when he’d rub shoulders with a better-paying clientele for his services. His surname’s not properly pronounced _Dam_ -e-ron, but Dam-e- _ron_. Pedro Damerón. Hux’s edicts have seen to it that a name like that wouldn’t be welcome in a place like Hatter’s. And regardless of his expertise with a Colt revolver and his occasional usefulness to the administration, doing jobs that sheriff deputies won't take—jobs they see as beneath them—Poe Dameron’s not welcome either.

“Show everyone that he’s weak,” Rey finishes, driving home her point like a brand. “Show _him_.”

Dameron shakes his head at her venom. But a wry curl of respect tilts his mouth, reluctant yet undeniable. “Damn, sweetheart,” he says. And he holds out his hand.

Rey grins, relieved and savage. “We have about three days.”

“Three? _Christ_. So what’s the plan? What do you need from me?”

She’s had time to think through the intricacies of her plot during long, fraught days when she forbade herself back from returning to Sweet Springs and the jail. She’d held herself to her ranch, to her chores. To the life she’s made and means to keep. But she’s schemed for hours in the saddle anyway while riding with her herd, released now from its calving enclosure. Planned during her silence while Finn and Rose talk and laugh, sitting side-by-side on the shanty porch in dusky evenings when the day’s work is finished.

Yes, she has a plan.

Under the cover of pitchy female laughter, men guffawing when their poker bluffs are called with cards revealed to be tawdry or triumphant, under Maz Kanata’s knowing gaze, Rey tells him.

“How can that work with just the two of us? If we’re going to get away clean without being spotted?” Dameron frowns down at his refreshed whiskey, a divot deepening over his twice-broken nose. “I could take off my hat and almost pass unnoticed if I don't smile, but you, you’re too recognizable—”

“We won’t be working alone.”

At least, Rey hopes they won’t be. After returning to her ranch at a brisk gallop, Little Bee snorting his pleasure in leaving the cluttered, noisy town behind for peaceful swells of pastureland, Rey puts her proposition to the fugitives over dinner. Finn and Rose are eating outside to celebrate the end of another day hiding in the barn while Rey's been in Sweet Springs. They’re reveling in breezes gusting over the valley’s ridge after hours spent breathing the stable’s stuffy, chaff-filled air, smiling at warm sunlight falling across their faces, sharing knives and Rey’s single spoon to eat from a pan of beans, peppers, and minced steak.

“You’ve got a bit…” Finn’s laughing, reaching over to rub his thumb against the corner of Rose’s mouth where a smear of rich brown juice touches her lip. She turns into his palm, eyes bright as onyx stars, laughing back at him with such pure joy that Rey’s stomach hollows.

“Did you get it all?”

Finn sucks his finger. “Mmm!”

Rose shoves at his arm in mock-offense, nearly upsetting the pan when he chuckles and reciprocates in kind.

Rey snatches away their dinner before it spills and splatters into the dirt. Raising her eyebrows at Rose, she pointedly clears her throat.

Rose halts her share in the roughhousing immediately. Finn sobers when she doesn’t laugh at his latest antics. They’re sitting very close together, knees almost touching. Rey directs an equally pointed glance at their proximity and thunks down her pan again. Steadying herself, and them.

“I need your help,” she says.

There’s a quiet moment while they all think through this extraordinary assertion. Not extraordinary in that she’ll ask for help—they’ve assisted cheerfully with Rey’s ranch chores for the past few weeks, learning to skin coveys and mend fences. But it's odd that Rey, hard taskmaster, has asked for help without telling them explicitly what she wants done and how to do it.

This is clearly something different than mucking out stalls or weeding the garden.

“With the railroad line?” Finn asks when their silence stretches from a simple pause into outright discomfort.

And worry.

“No. Though what you know about it could be helpful.”

“Well, if it's not the railroad, then what is it?”

“I...need an explosion. No one would get hurt,” Rey adds hastily when one of Rose’s fists clenches on the porch’s edge, the other rising to grip her necklace with white knuckles. “It’s only a distraction, so I can...help a friend.”

“How would an explosion do that?”

“I have to get at a set of keys. I need the person who has them to leave the ring unwatched. So I need a distraction that’ll unsettle him enough that he’ll forget his keys when he goes to see what’s happened. What’s exploded.”

“You’re freeing someone else,” Rose cuts across Finn’s next question with a burning look that quells him and washes dark color over his cheeks.

“...yes.”

It’s not a lie.

“From the town jail,” Rey continues. “There’s a woman there who shouldn’t be. And a man locked up for setting off the railroad’s explosion. He’s not guilty. He wasn’t anywhere near the tracks when it happened. But they’ll hang him after his trial anyhow, because the mayor has a grudge. Hux—the mayor—made promises about the railway, and he wants someone to blame—”

“This mayor.” Both of Rose’s hands now climb to clutch the curved metal sliver hanging around her neck. “He brought the line here. Brought us.”

“Yes.”

“And this explosion...it’ll hurt him.”

His pride and credibility, certainly.

To the vengeance gleaming in Rose’s eyes, eclipsing her joy from Finn’s touch so that their starry shine is snuffed and a chilly glitter takes its place, Rey repeats, “Yes.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

Finn snorts, exasperation or disbelief. “Wait, Tico—think about this. We can’t go near enough to the town to set charges around any jail. And we don’t even know anything about how to—”

“I do.” Rose brushes off his warning and his hand on her shoulder. She looks hard at Rey. “I know how to set an explosion.”

“What?”

“I learned on the line. From Paige.”

“ _From_ —” Finn chokes on his own surprise, snorting again so hard he coughs. “B-but she was...a…”

“Woman,” Rose finishes for him. “Yes.” One hand releases her necklace to trail against her ankle, her skin healed thick and tough with calluses.

_Necklace, ankle._

And then Rey finally understands what’s been niggling at the corners of her mind from the moment she met Rose Tico. She’s always suspected this woman of knowing more than she lets on around Finn. And she's been right. Rey sees this, all in an instant. Because now...now she understands with perfect, brutal clarity that Paige Tico must’ve set off the railway line's nitroglycerin explosion. Set it off on a desperate chance to break her sister free from her shackles.

Sacrificed herself in a white-hot blast to do it.

So much love; Rose’s necklace is one curved half of a circular whole.

Rey knows all this with a bone-deep echo through her entire body. Loss, sacrifice, and rage. _Truth_.

Small wonder that Rose Tico craves revenge against a man who brought her sister, herself, and the man she loves to this valley in chains. To the place where her sister died. Revenge against a man who forced Paige to make an impossible choice.

“You don’t have to be part of this,” Rose tells Finn. Her gaze locks again with Rey’s, seeing her understanding. A tiny nod—acknowledging what they know. “We can do this alone.”

Finn swallows. His eyes flicker sideways; the look of a man who wants to run.

But he doesn’t. Finn’s hand closes around Rose’s fingers on her ankle. “I’m in,” he says.

"It'll be dangerous." Rose shifts her grip onto his hand. She squeezes hard enough to make tendons pop beneath his skin. “We’ll need to hide our faces. You too, Rey. Because they know you in town, don’t they?”

An echo of Poe Dameron’s worry.

“Yes. But I…”

 _Rose Tico_ : masquerading as a man in trousers and a loose shirt, clothes that Rey wears every day on her ranch. Clothes she wears any time she goes to town, too. Hair bound back, face bare of rouged and powdered arts that fashionable women in Sweet Springs enact before vanity mirrors.

“I need to be able to walk into the jail without being recognized,” she says, gnawing her lip.

Dameron won’t have to worry about hiding his face; he’s acting an innocent role in their charade. But the Sweet Springs warden knows Rey from her too-frequent visits to the cellblock. If she appears at his desk directly before a jailbreak…it’s a miracle he’s been too distracted by her breasts to suspect her intentions already.

“You could wear different clothes,” Rose suggests, eyebrows cocked and tracking Rey’s thoughts with uncanny precision. She nods against Rey’s uncertainty and half-hearted disgust. “You could dress like a woman. Powder on your face and color on your lips, like they wear. With a fan to hide behind.”

“What kind of woman would visit a jail?” Finn scoffs.

“A whore,” Rey says flatly.

It’s a perfect disguise for her.

She hates it.

As arranged during their Cantina conversation, Rey meets with Dameron several miles outside Sweet Springs in the next day’s early hours. Neither dismounts while they murmur together, honing their plan. They listen hard for leaves crackling or branches snapping under eavesdroppers’ feet, ready to gallop away from the poplar copse where they’ve found a shadow of privacy for plotting, prepared to deny they’ve ever seen each other here. While they talk and listen with jittery nerves, Rey mentions again that she has accomplices.

“Not the Ren Seven,” Dameron groans.

“No.” Rey scowls. “People like us.”

Eyebrows rise beneath Dameron's Stetson. “Oh. Do they need anything?”

“Can you get nitroglycerin and a dress?” She makes the request as neutrally as she can. Not blushing.

“Nitro...and what? A _dress_?”

“And nitroglycerin. Or something like it. Proving Ren can’t have set the charges, since he’s in locked jail.”

“Fine, fine. But why a dress?” Dameron waves a distracted hand. His buckskin quarter horse shifts restlessly, irritated at the tight clench of his rider’s thighs and the shortness of his reins.

Rey can't help worrying her lip. “Just...please. With a fan. Shoes? And red paint that women wear on their lips. That, too.”

“Maz might…”

“Thank you. Bring your goods to pinnacles at the valley’s northeast corner at noon. That gives you a good four hours to get them.” She points Little Bee back toward her ranch.

“ _Why a dress?_ ” Dameron’s bellow blows along on a rustling wind as Rey gallops out of their clandestine poplar dell and across the exposed lowlands.

It sounds like laughter.

Rey presses forward against her saddlebow and urges Little Bee on, outpacing that mocking breeze. She doesn't turn back to reply.

She hates this plan. The dress idea most of all. But she’s made a promise. Made her choice.

“Be very, very careful when handling this,” the gunslinger says when they meet later by the appointed pinnacles, dismounting to hand over a small, nailed-studded crate padded with straw at its seams. Dameron watches Rey settle the carton into her saddlebags, his expression pained as though he already regrets relinquishing the explosive to her. “It’ll detonate if it gets too much pressure or heat, so just don’t...touch it. Or jostle it. God forbid.”

“How’d you get it so quickly?” Rey checks her satchel's fastenings. Secure. The box won’t shift, and straw will soften any movement from the bottle inside.

“Rode out to the railway line on a progress inspection from the mayor today. The guards are keeping their nitro in little bottles instead of jugs. Easier to transport safely, with plenty of padding. Nicking a single one was easy. The overseer was trying to warm up some horrible cold coffee for Mr. Hux’s representative,” Dameron pokes himself in the chest with a thumb, “and it took him a damn long time. Trying to impress me with his prowess on a camp stove, how he was in charge of everything. How capable he was. Idiot.”

“Does Hux know about your inspection?”

Dameron’s sideways grin flashes. “Could he object if I did? He likes his reports. I’ll give him one too, all nice and tidy on clean paper and everything. If it ever comes up. Things are just so busy in Sweet Springs right now, writing up the findings must’ve slipped my mind.”

For all his protests earlier, Rey has an uncomfortable, sneaking suspicion that Dameron’s enjoying planning this jailbreak far too much. And far too recklessly.

“The dress?” she says, to snap off his smile.

“Won’t you tell me what it’s for?” He drags a cloth-wrapped bundle from a satchel on his saddlehorn and lobs it into her arms with much less ceremony than when he’d surrendered the precious and precarious nitroglycerin. “Had to make up a pack of lies for Maz to get it, especially this early in the day. To early to go courting. I’m not sure she believed me.”

“You’d just laugh.” Rey stuffs away the packet, unnecessarily rough. “But if you must know, so you won’t be surprised when I...uh. It’s a disguise.”

“Sooo…” Dameron drags out the word while he works through her confession, her stumble. Then his eyes spark. “So you’re going to wear— _you!_ My god, I thought you must’ve meant one of your accomplices, but—” He pushes back his hat, tilting up his chin in appraisal, grin widening again.

“Don’t you dare laugh!”

Because of the fragile nitroglycerin bottle, she has to walk Little Bee back to her ranch. Rey can’t outrun Dameron’s howling mirth.

“This, I’d pay to see! If you’d only told me about this from the beginning, you won’t have had to convince me to go along with your insanity!”

_Ugh._

“Did you get the nitroglycerin?” Rose asks when Rey and her mustang walk up to the shanty, Rey red-cheeked with suppressed fury, Little Bee mouthing his bit and frothing at their glacial pace.

“Did you get the dress?” is Finn’s contribution.

Rey glares at Finn. She thrusts the cloth-wrapped bundle into his arms with such an emphatic push that he overbalances and sits down hard in the grass. Ignoring him, Rose observes around Rey’s shoulder as she delicately pries open the explosive’s crate with her knife. The lid levered up, Rey steps aside and motions Rose closer. The other woman chimes experienced fingernails against a dark, squat bottle nestled in the crate's straw bedding. She traces its skull-and-crossbones label—an illiterate warning of danger.

“Good.” Her eyes lift sideways and find Rey’s. Understanding washes again between them: currents of loss and determination. Nodding, she steps over to Finn. Rose reaches down for the bundle of female artifacts that he still clutches. She tugs it loose and says, “Finn, go to the barn and stay there until we call for you.”

“What?”

“ _Now_.”

He can’t very well refuse when Rey adds her glare to Rose’s command. A magenta flush suffusing his cheekbones, Finn leaves his friend Tico and Rey to shut themselves in the shanty while he withdraws alone to the stable. His lips mumble and his feet drag reproachfully.

Pausing a moment on the cabin's threshold, Rose shrugs at his retreating figure. When she latches the door, her hands are almost steady. “He can’t know.”

“No?”

“Not yet.”

Rey shrugs in turn. “Will you ever tell him?”

Rose snorts, a noncommittal sound. She lays out Dameron’s bundle on the table and unknots the corners from an old, stained sheet that’s protected its contents from dust and damage. Distracting them both, for a while.

Rey’s grateful for it.

“Oh…” And then Rey’s gratitude swells again when Rose makes a gesture that she doesn’t trust herself to do: stroking reverent fingers over a swell of vibrant indigo satin rising and breathing in its release from the packet. “Look...how beautiful.”

Rey winks at salt in the corners of her eyes. “Staining,” she points to a discolored patch, dull and faded against the glossy weave.

Rose shushes her with a finger. She raises up a draped skirt figured with cascading ruffles around a tiered, bustled hemline, gives its creases a shake, and layers it against Rey’s figure. When Rey tries to jerk back, protesting the luxurious brush of silk on her skin, Rose fixes her with a glare.

“Hold still.” She lifts the bodice next and holds it to Rey’s shoulders.

“It’ll be too small,” Rey scoffs. She digs her fingers into the fabric just the same. Fragile threads catch on her scarred and callused hands. If she releases the satin, she’ll tear its weft from the roughness on her palms. So she keeps it close.

But indeed, the bodice’s waist proves to be no wider around than the span of a large man’s hands. Rey will be damned before she cinches herself into a corset to shape her body for something like this. Even if it’s pretty. So pretty, with a neckline like a swallow’s swooping flight and a generous bow concealing her cleavage, the basque fitting smoothly over her bust. It fastens with tiny jet buttons that wink and giggle at being undone. Some of the clasps are missing and the bow’s parted from its collar so that it hangs drunkenly over her breasts.

“You’ll leave it unbuttoned,” is Rose’s answer to this problem. “That’s what a whore would do, isn’t it?”

“But I—”

Rose ignores her as thoroughly as she’s ignored Finn outside. She leaves Rey as an awkward coat rack to hold the dress pieces while she investigates what else Dameron's bundle’s contains. A paper fan, tattered at the edges but beautifully painted in a crimson China scene—“Match the rouge,” Rose murmurs to herself with a crooked half-smile—a pair of kid leather slippers stained yellow on the soles, easy to kick off when taking a paying gentleman upstairs. And a separate little handkerchief packet that contains a jar of pale powder with a puff, a stick of charcoal, and a pot of crimson paint.

“I don’t know how to use those,” Rey protests. “I’ll poke my eye out.”

The corner of Rose’s mouth twitches higher. “We’ll learn. Now, try on the dress.”

It’s that, or experiment with the cosmetics. Rey elects for the dress. And she does try. But even without a corset, the skirt’s waistband cinches her belly and hips so that she can’t draw a full breath. The basque barely fastens at all, closing only halfway up her ribs. Self-conscious and annoyed, she covers her partially exposed breasts with her palms and scowls at the shanty floorboards.

“The skirt’s too long,” she mutters. “We need to cut it.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” Rose circles Rey, twitching the fabric here and there so that it falls smoothly over her ass in impractical floral cataracts, creamy-hued blooms parting back from the underskirt’s ruffling before spiraling with their indigo weft in a stupid, pretty train. “It’s perfect.”

“I feel like a fool.”

“But you’ll look just right. I may not know anything about clothes like these, but this dress is...very pretty. Like you.”

Rey scoffs for what seems like the thousandth time. At least it’s a safe noise. Not a croon at the lovely, treacherous feel of satin on bare skin. “I hate it.”

Rose smiles. “No, you don’t. But let’s get you into your own clothes for now. Then I’ll let Finn out.”

“What was all that?” he demands when they’re seated together on the porch again, eating a late afternoon meal with the faint, calm sounds of bovine lowing in the distance. A breeze rippling up from the poplar-shaded river soothes away heat in Rey’s cheeks.

“You’ll see.” Rose raises her eyebrows and licks their single spoon clean.

“It should be you,” Rey grouses while they clean their dishes in washwater that Finn and Mille are hauling up from the creek; the mule spits and brays, which just makes Finn roar with laughter back at her. “You should be the one wearing those clothes. You’re better at this than I am.”

“I’m better with explosives than pretty things. All I remember is what Paige would wear sometimes if she was going out courting in Hays. She was so beautiful. I don’t know what to do with things like that myself. I _am_ good with explosives, though.” Rose picks at a spot of grime on bean pan’s bottom.

“But we’re going to do this anyway.”

Rose touches her hand, fingers wrinkled and pink with immersion in the washtub. “Yes.”

Eighteen hours remain until Ren’s trial date when Rey is satisfied that her plan's ready, double and triple-checked for contingencies. Eighteen hours and they’re ready, too, with Dameron knowing to take up his position near the jail.

“Time,” Rose says.

Dropping her forehead into her hands, Rey groans.

“It’ll be all right,” the other woman promises. She leads Rey into the shanty to dress her.

Rey wears her most capacious—and only—winter coat over her half-fastened garments as they ride off from the ranch for Sweet Springs. She ignores Finn’s curious gaze at that sweltering jacket. At her absurdly trailing hemline. At her rouged and powdered face with charcoal shadows swiped across her eyelids, at her hair pinned atop her head in a massive snarl of a bun. She feels like a raccoon in skirts. Like a damn fool. She insists on riding Little Bee astride, ignoring Rose’s wince when a seam tears in her bustle as she swings her right leg over the mustang’s rump. There’s no way in hell that she’s going to pretend to use a sidesaddle, a knee crooked awkwardly over her horn. Besides, they’ll need to approach the town on foot. Little Bee’s markings are too distinctive and Millie won’t keep quiet for anything if she spots a clover patch. Rose and Finn follow after Rey on the mule, who’s strong enough to take their combined weights—they’re probably little heavier together than when she’d carried Kylo Ren alone.

With the nitroglycerin in mind, they keep an easy pace through Rey’s milling herd and across the pastures until they’re about a half-mile from Sweet Springs. Then they leave their mounts sheltered in a retired hollow of valley oaks—its banks boast a healthy growth of clover to placate Millie while they’re gone. They walk the remainder of the way to the town, Rey grimacing and hefting at her skirts' constrictive beauty, Finn and Rose sweating behind scraps of cloth wound over their jaws. Not that anyone will be looking for them or other railway deserters; they’re assumed to be dead, blown to smithereens in the explosion. But just the same, they’re all on hair-trigger alert as they approach Sweet Springs’ outskirts. Rose carries Rey’s satchel, cradling the nitroglycerin cask inside as though it’s exactly as precious and deadly as it really is.

“We’ll come to the jail from behind Patterson’s tannery,” Rey murmurs a reminder, skirting far from Main Street where the crowds are thick and dangerous on boardwalks. They weave with lowered heads between outbuildings and into alleyways. Her hem picks up unspeakables in the gutters. She does her best to ignore something wet brushing against her calves with her skirt's every swish. “Patterson’s half-blind. He won’t notice us.”

Having reached the noxious tannery’s rear with their eyes watering at its fumes, Rey prepares to part from Finn and Rose.

“Dameron's wearing a white Stetson. He'll signal to you when I’m ready. Watch for him.”

“We know,” Finn frets, jigging in place.

“Good luck.” Rose kisses Rey’s rouged cheek, to Finn’s and Rey’s equal astonishment.

And also to Rey’s secret pleasure, which surprises her even more than the kiss. “And you.”

She watches her saboteurs edge past the tannery’s holding pens with their nitroglycerin satchel, moving to ready an explosive distraction just down the street from the jail. Shadows swallow them into the next alley. No deputy’s whistle sounds. They’re safe enough as they go. _Good._ Then Rey sighs and grits her teeth into a smile.

Bundling her coat and spare clothes out of sight, raising her tattered fan, she steps into the open road. Her nerves thrum as sunlight crests the swells of her half-exposed breasts bursting through the straining satin basque. She resists an urge to cover herself with the fan’s arch; she needs it over her face, making a secret of her nose and mouth as an outlaw’s bandana does. If a radish-red flush suffuses her cheeks and the peaks of her breasts, it only serves to heighten the rouge that Rose has applied with a lavish hand. Accustomed to well-soled boots, her slippered feet cringe against the road’s dusty heat radiating into her skin, the dirt hot as live coals under summer's sun. Her toes wrinkle at the gutters’ refuse. She spots Poe Dameron lingering in a lazy attitude against a hitching post near the jail, a _cigarillo_ cupped in one hand, but she doesn’t meet his gaze. She minces straight onward to the doors. A jet button springs free from its threads when she draws on the handles, exposing another half-inch of her breasts beneath their idiotic bow. Rey firms her teeth behind her rouged lips. She steps through into the jail.

“Good afternoon,” she murmurs to the warden on duty, in what she hopes passes for a seductive purr. It’s the same man behind the desk from each of her past visits. Rey lifts her fan an inch higher, praying he won’t notice the familiar curve of her cheekbones or the tilted tips of her eyes—not that anyone could possibly suspect her, either Rey or Rachel Ridley, of dressing this way! Indeed, the man hardly even glances at her heavily painted face, his attention all for her bursting buttons.

Her skin crawls.

But Rey advances against her disgust, an artful wriggle freeing yet another button. Entranced, the jailer doesn’t look away while she approaches his desk. While she approaches a ring of keys to the cells hanging above it. “I wonder, sir, if you—” And Rey gives two quick flips of her fan.

It’s her signal to Dameron, watching Rey's performance across the street through a grated window into the jail's front room. From the corner of a charcoal-caked eye, she sees him casually but deliberately drop his lit _cigarillo_. His own signal to Rose and Finn: hurl the bottle, and duck for cover.

“—could help me with something,” she continues to the attendant in her throaty voice, hoping against hope that she won’t have to slip loose a third button. She’ll be naked to the waist, soon.

“Uhhhh...I…” Rendered more incoherent than usual by the vision of her breasts freed from Rey’s ordinary shirtwaists, the jailer struggles to form words. But his eyes are making a valiant effort to ascend from her bosom, when—

The barred window’s glass shatters. Shards spray between its rods and across the floor, shearing through papers on the warden’s desk as an explosion tears apart an unoccupied section of street outside. The jail's walls tremble and shake, dust raining down from overhead beams and through mortared cracks in the bricks. The keeper's desk lurches, one uneven leg buckling so that the whole mess on its surface tips sideways to the floor. Inkwells smash spectacularly as they land. Files, record sheets, and visitor logs have their contents erased with massive splattering stains of black and blue.

_Perfect._

“Oh!” Rey exclaims in her daintiest tones, as though some songbird is strangling in her throat. “Oh, my—”

“Explosion, there’s been an explosion! Something’s blown straight—oh my god, help, come quickly!” Dameron’s shouting for assistance outside the jail. Rey wonders whether the warden can hear laughter quivering through his voice.

Clearly not.

“Miss—stay—I—what—the _hell—_ ” With a tenacious reluctance that’s almost admirable in the face of such disaster, the jailer at last manages to drag away his eyes from Rey’s exposed breasts. He lurches out of his chair and grabs clumsily for a pistol fallen to the floor along with his ruined desk and papers. Then he runs out into the street to answer Dameron’s desperate, laughter-cracking summons.

The gunslinger will keep the jail's warden occupied for as long as he can with hysterics and demands for assistance. It’ll take a while for the explosion’s dust to settle, to determine that nothing's been injured in the blast but a stretch of empty street. Finn and Rose will scamper away unmolested through the alleyways to Millie and Little Bee, running from the eruption while everyone else runs toward it.

Hopefully.

But now:

Rey seizes the warden’s keyring, hanging unattended from its iron hook during the man’s abrupt, discombobulated absence. So ripe for the plucking. Kicking aside her bustled skirts, it’s the work of a minute for her to fit a key into the grated door’s lock, swing it open, and hurry down the dirty passageway to where Leia Organa and Kylo Ren are kept in their cells.

A sharp breath from Leia as she sees, as she understands. “Rey? Good heavens—what on earth are you—”

Rey brandishes her keys, ignoring the blister of Ren’s silent, attentive gaze on her cheek. Her voice hardly cracks when she says,

“It’s time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally makin' good on that jail-breaking tag! ;)
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	15. Chapter 15

Again, she’s here.

Again, Ren finds himself speechless.

She comes striding down the jail passageway with a ring of keys held before her as a bulwark or a torch. Her dimly-lit face is smeared with red paint and powder over lips and cheeks, great swaths of gritty charcoal sweeping across her eyelids. Tiers of ruffled blue satin swish around her ankles. Her breasts are nearly bare in a basque half-buttoned and askew.

So yes, he’s speechless. Not with horror from an explosion ringing against his eardrums—no, not even that. It’s her dress. It’s Rey's damn _dress_ that’s silenced him. And he just...stares. Like a simple idiot, Ren’s lost the ability to speak and can only look.

“It’s time,” Rey says in a clipped voice, ignoring his baffled stare in favor of fussing with her keys. She fits one into the lock on Leia Organa’s cell, a noise of satisfaction curling her tongue. “And we don't have much. Hurry.” Shuttling back the tumblers, she steps back to allow Leia into the cellblock passageway. A rippling shadow of a shudder dances over her shoulders, hitching them as Leia passes. Then she turns to Ren. Rey holds the keyring protectively over her nakedness.

“Don’t say anything,” she warns him. Rey kneels and sets to work on his cell. Her breasts flutter beneath their scanty covering while she jiggles this and that key in the narrow lock, trying to find a proper fit. “Not a damn thing.”

Fine. He’s still not capable of speech, anyhow.

_That dress, those lips._

Rey shoves key after key at his lock, crimson-painted mouth pressed tightly into a line so that its bloody color bleeds into creases dimpling her chin. Beneath their charcoal lines, her eyes spark and glitter. Kneeling before him, half-naked with the curves of well-rouged breasts spilling from her bodice, scowling when the cell’s lock resists her...Ren’s never seen anything so magnificent.

“Not one single word,” Rey reminds him between her teeth.

He clears his throat, pointing out his compliance.

Rey ignores him while he clenches the iron rods above her. She fumbles with her keys, swearing under her breath and darting wary glances up the jail's passageway. But after another moment and a truly inventive invective, she finds the mechanism's correct fit—his cell door’s tumblers align. A gratifying resonance hums through the bars he grips with anxious hands. Anxious, because he still can’t quite believe that she’s doing this.

Rey is breaking him out of jail.

And dressed like...this...for the job, too.

Not that he’s fantasized about such an event—not much. Only a little when the nights are long, when his body remembers the hot press of her hand on his cheek while her knife scrapes against his throat, his fingers finding the backs of her knees or clutching his own cock. But reality far exceeds his expectations. Even the most foolish ones.

“Out,” Rey snaps, withdrawing her key. Rising, she dusts her hands against her ribs, just as she would when wearing an ordinary shirtwaist. But she's so clearly _not_ wearing a shirtwaist; her scraping palms tug loose another button from her bodice. Ren steels himself and his groin not to react to the exquisite, tantalizing view while he pushes through his cell door and into the passage. Leia and Rey are already striding back toward the jail's front room ahead of him, not waiting. He lurches after them, muscles stiff with sudden stretching and disuse.

“My dear—” Leia's saying while they pass through the grated door, but Rey hushes her. A finger on her lips comes away smeared with rouge.

“No,” she murmurs. “Quiet. Down the street around the crowd, to the nearest alley. Quickly.”

“Not without my effects,” Ren croaks.

Rey whirls on the jail's threshold. “ _What?_ ”

“My satchels and my horse.”

Exasperation brightening her smoke-drawn eyes, Rey's mouth falls open to protest this delay, exposing teeth stained red with the same paint glistening over her lips. But then—

“Fine. Where?”

“The courtyard,” Leia cuts in. “There’s a shed with prisoners’ articles and a lean-to stable for stock, before everything is auctioned off after a trial.”

Rey grunts in reply. Cracking open the jail's front doors, she sticks her nose into a maelstrom of dust and debris outside, squinting at the street's scene. Then she nods for Ren and Leia to follow her closely. They edge from the jail and emerge into an almost indescribable confusion—shrieking or fainting women, men yelling for order, fifty people and a few goats gathered around a crater where part of the street has disappeared into a yawning hole. Some idiot’s firing off a pistol, shouting in a vaguely familiar voice for everyone to _quiet down, move along, get back, you fool!_ Naturally, these commands don't do the trick. Since everyone in the road is coated with billowing dust and other unsavory mementos of an exploding Sweet Springs gutter, Ren and Leia are hardly out of place in their grimy clothes. Keeping to the jail's exterior walls, they follow Rey around the building’s far corner and to the prison courtyard.

A raised scaffold and hanging rope greet them there. A warning, which Ren ignores as best he can. He steadily averts his eyes from its looming, watchful shadow while he thieves.

“They won't have been feeding her well,” he gripes while he strides past the gallows to a lean-to stable. Breaking open its latch, he releases his mare from dreary company with a few pigs and a donkey belonging to the peace-disturbing drunks. He collects her tack, saddlebags, and his crutches from a dilapidated shed actually leaning up against the lean-to stable—his Winchester, he notes sourly, has been more permanently confiscated than his bedroll.

Rey’s mouth pinches again at his grousing delay, but she tucks her chin when Ren leads his pleased, baffled mare into the courtyard with her tack and gear, a hand stroking under the chestnut’s mane, crutches hanging from his saddle horn.

“Walk her out,” she says. “Don’t draw attention to yourself with galloping off. We’ll follow. Is there anything you need, Mrs. Organa?”

“I've nothing left.” Leia’s rueful laugh cracks with dust blowing across the sheltered yard from where stampeding feet are eagerly running to view the street’s destruction. There’s a particular human joy in tragedy, in ruin. She tilts her head to Ren. “Go.”

They leave the jail's yard singly, one at a time so as not to call notice to themselves by appearing to move with too much purpose through the street’s milling, gesticulating crowd. Ren is acutely aware of every glance that passes over him as he tows his mare through the throng. His nape crinkles with each pair of eyebrows frowning an assessment of the grime that coats his clothes, slightly different in its disgusting composition than the explosion’s debris. One man pauses his shouted conversation with a neighbor, frankly tipping back his hat in appraisal as Ren walks past. He starts to reach for his companion’s arm, hand raising to point—

A Colt pistol sings out, abruptly drawing attention back to a shooter at the crowd’s knotted centerpoint. “Calmly, folks! Let's see if anyone’s hurt!”

It’s Poe Dameron.

“Keep walking.” A finger prods Ren's tailbone. “Don’t stare. _Walk._ ”

“Is he involved?” Ren spits through the corner of his mouth to Rey and her sharp, rude fingers. He clenches the chestnut’s reins so that the mare tosses her head and flecks his cheek with protesting foam. “That damn pretty boy—”

“Yes. He’s keeping their focus on him, not on us. Walk.”

It’s not as though he has much choice. Walk on, or return to his jail cell. But still— _Poe Dameron_? He’d almost rather stay stewing in his own filth than accept help from that bastard.

“Don’t,” Leia mutters a warning when she passes him through the crowd, moving at a steady but carefully unhurried pace, her steps directed for an alleyway that twists out of sight from the road’s convoluted mess. “Do as Rey says. Walk.”

Ren’s mare gives him an inquiring nudge and a prompt to ease his grip on her leathers. Ears flicking at the pistol’s third rapport, her eyes roll over the crowd. It's beginning to come to order as Dameron marshals rubberneckers away from the street’s blown-open crater with assistance from a mustachioed, fish-eyed man that Ren recognizes as his warden. The same one who’s ogled Rey.

The explosion’s bought them time, but never quite enough.

He strides forward, urging his mare into a trot at his heels. When the jailer's head swivels toward a disturbance that Ren and his chestnut make passing through the crowd, they’ve already disappeared into the alley.

Rey’s stripping out of her dress when he rounds the alleyway's corner into a refuse-strewn street behind Patterson’s tannery. There’s a modicum of privacy and a moment to breathe, here—though not too deeply, for the gutters’ stench. Rey's already jerked the skirt off her hips, exposing a pair of ordinary trousers beneath it. She works loose the basque’s remaining buttons, then shrugs the bodice off her shoulders as she’d remove a vest. Back turned to Ren and Leia, she reaches for a shirtwaist bundled into the pocket of a winter coat that's stashed between the tannery’s overflowing rubbish bin and its livestock pens.

“If I catch you looking, I’ll put your eyes out with a cattle brand,” she warns as she drops the shirtwaist over her head. The tapered, perfect angles of her ribs and shoulderblades vanish beneath the garment’s plain fabric. Hiding away freckles dusting her arms and dimples low on her spine...but not erasing them.

It’s fairly clear that she’s not talking to Leia.

Despite Rey’s threat and their tenuous circumstances, Ren can’t help grinning. He’ll risk her cattle brand gladly. As a last image, this wouldn’t be a bad one: the shadowed edge of a rosy breast, delicate wisps of hair curling behind her ears.

His cock stiffens attentively against a seam in his trousers.

 _No._ Riding while aroused is one of the most painful punishments known to mankind. _Later_ , he promises himself. Because if they make it out of town alive, there will be a later. And another. And one after that.

Finally turning around with her shirtwaist buttoned to her chin, blissfully unaware of his spooling thoughts—Ren’s escaped the cattle brand for today, at least—Rey stuffs her dress into the coat’s bundle, knotting its sleeves and corners so that no treacherous hints of blue satin peep through to betray her. She shucks off her slippers and shoves her feet into a pair of boots she’s also stashed in the alley. The explosion’s dust settling over her face conceals the paint on her lips and cheeks well enough. She’ll be able to move without comment in the streets. Ren only hopes that he and Leia can pass the same gauntlet.

“Hurry.” Rey slings the coat over her shoulder. “We’ll meet up with the others in the lowlands.”

Fearful feet carry them swiftly, skittishly through Sweet Springs’ derelict western outskirts. They emerge into the town's surrounding flatlands, where human refuse encroaches on wild ground. Frowning and kicking aside a broken whiskey bottle, Rey charts a course between shallow dales that sunder planes of pastureland. She steers them through wooded copses, wary of silhouetting their figures upon hills or the open road. She doesn’t speak or glance behind to see whether they’re keeping pace, striding ahead with furious purpose.

“You should thank her,” Leia tells him, slightly short of breath where she walks on the chestnut’s far side. Brisk, unflagging steps contrast against her unsteady breathing.

“She told me not to talk,” Ren mutters. He tugs on his mare’s reins to coax her along when she cranes her neck toward verdant grasses growing tall and sweet beside their path. But _god damn,_ he sounds so petulant.

“In these circumstances, I would do it anyway.”

It’s not a request, suggesting that he grovel his thanks to Rey; Leia Organa does not request. She may frame an order nicely, but it’s an order just the same. She’s shorter than Ren remembers, shoulders stooped under a mended, smock-like dress she’s worn in jail, despite the erect posture she keeps in her neck and spine. White hairs lace the crown of her head among the gray. She takes two steps for every one of his. Small, old, and tired. But still, those commands.

He doesn’t have to obey.

She laughs at his scowling silence. “So like your father.”

_Damn her._

But before Ren can retort, Rey draws up ahead with her arm and fist raised: a signal for halt and silence. They’re approaching an oak-shaded dell with lush clover on its banks that has the chestnut blowing little wickers of desire through her nostrils. The ground before them is freshly disturbed—grasses flattened, some uprooted.

“Finn? Tico? It’s me,” Rey calls in a voice scarcely louder than wind murmuring against the trees’ branches.

A pause; the quiet of motion suddenly ceasing. And then—

“Rey?” A sigh, gusty with relief. A man’s voice continues, “What took you so long? We were starting to think we’d need to leave without you, before any searchers came our way.”

“Some of us thought that. Others thought we should stay,” another voice chimes in.

Two figures appear between the oaks’ trunks, rounding a curved pitch in the dell. Dressed in dark, plain trousers and shirts, bandanas around their necks ready to be raised in an instant to cover the tell-tale features of mouth and nose—it’s a garb Ren knows well.

“Tico and Finn set off the jail's explosion,” Rey explains as they approach. “They’re—”

But before she can continue, a saboteur with ink-black hair drawn into a queue rushes forward and enfolds Rey in a hard embrace, stifling her words and filling Rey's sputtering silence with, “So glad you’re safe—when you weren’t back soon after us—I thought—”

To Ren’s utter astonishment, Rey doesn’t shy back or threaten branding. When she raises a hand from her companion’s shoulder, she strokes it over the bound hair instead. A tentative gesture, fingers held together like a shovel rather than softening to comb through the stands...but it twists the pit of his stomach. His mare jerks her head in protest at the tension on her bit.

“I know. It’s all right,” Rey assures her co-conspirator in a low voice, still stroking awkwardly, gently. “No one was hurt.”

Who the hell is _this_? Because the Rey that Ren knows doesn’t touch other people much. Skittish and standoffish, she’s liable to lash out rather than endure contact. She doesn’t embrace. She hardly even shakes hands! And she damn sure doesn’t let anyone embrace _her_.

Least of all a strange man.

Even by the river, she never let him—

The chestnut smacks her muzzle hard against his shoulder, frothing around her bit.

“Sorry, sorry,” Ren mutters. But he can’t wrench his eyes away from the scene searing into his brain: Rey in another man’s arms.

But then—

“I’m Finn,” the other saboteur is saying, standing in front of him with an extended hand. Waiting for him to shake it. Frowning, when Ren doesn’t.

“I...uh. Finn. I’m…” He grips the man’s fingers but stammers to a halt before giving his name in return. Irresistibly, his gaze edges past Finn’s shoulder to where Rey and her companion are still embracing. Their knuckles shine white with the force of their clasp upon each other’s shoulders.

Leia sighs beside him. She touches his arm in a reminder and reprimand. “Ren. Kylo Ren. And I am Leia Organa. We should both thank you for your assistance. You and...Tico?”

“He’s the one who really knows about explosives.” Finn takes Leia’s hand.

Laughter soughs in her throat while they shake on their acquaintance. Like Ren’s, her eyes find Rey and Tico in their embrace. “He?”

“Tico? Yes.” Finn cocks his head. “We came off the railway line together. Got out together. Best friend I have.”

“Is he?” Leia laughs again, a brighter sound. Leaving Finn and Ren nonplussed before her sudden merriment, she steps forward to join Rey and Tico under the oaks’ massy shade. She lays a hand on their shoulders and a murmur in their ears. A moment...and then they break apart with reluctant hands. Leia nods, eyes hard on Tico’s upturned face, mouth tilted into a smile.

Ren is abruptly aware that he’s missing something—Leia cups Tico’s cheeks in her palms. Her smile stretches wider, lips moving in another murmur. Tico smiles back, sniffing and nodding as well. And Ren's also aware that Finn’s slack jaw has contracted into a scowl.

“We should go,” the other man tells to Ren in a terse voice, not looking at him. “Before they start scouting out from the town. Time!” he says, louder to the others.

Millie mumbles green-frothed greetings from a clover patch when Ren leads his chestnut down a knoll and into the oak copse; Rey and the others have begun mounting onto Little Bee and the mule under its dappled shade. He returns Millie's cordial snort with one of his own.

“Tico, with me.” Rey hauls the slight-bodied man behind her on Little Bee’s rump. A tilt of her chin indicates that Leia should join Finn on Millie. Ren’s left to mount up on his chestnut alone. That, or watch the others trot away from the dell while he fumes on the ground. _Damn it, damn it_. Tico’s arms close snugly around Rey’s waist when Little Bee breaks into a canter.

Jealousy’s never an emotion he’d thought he’d endure for a woman. He’s _Kylo Ren_.

Least of all over snappy, touch-averse Rey.

But this is jealousy, hollowing out his ribs. There’s little point in denying it. However much he wants to, wants not to care, it’s too pure a sensation to mistake. Vibrant, poisonous green, coiling in his chest. He hates it.

Rey? She’s hardly looked at him since springing him from jail. He doesn’t understand. Because if she doesn’t care, then why risk so much?

He has to content himself that at least Poe Dameron’s not part of their happy riding party while they gallop east beneath a haze of late afternoon sun reflecting off ridged mountains’ craggy sienna slopes above the valley. This view’s nearly the most beautiful thing he’s seen in weeks of confinement to a dark, grimy cell. But Ren glowers between his mare’s ears at its magnificence; Tico murmurs something against Rey’s cheek, and Rey chortles with laughter.

Better than if it were Dameron, but still:

_Who the hell is this man?_

Common lowlands become homestead ranches or farms, which become Rey’s pastures as they cross the blooming valley floor. They ride through her grazing cattle herd with frolicking, nursing calves and up a familiar crested hill to where her barn and shanty stand, small as children’s toys. It’s just as Ren remembers. Mellow sunlight on the porch and peeping through unchinked walls, a chuckling breeze off the river, contented bovine lowing. And Rey. Rey, swinging off Little Bee and helping Tico slide down after, then holding Millie’s bridle while Finn and Leia dismount. She hesitates, almost—but then passes Ren toward the barn with her mustang and mule in tow, ignoring him with an averted face.

And a crimson ear.

It’s not rouge. Not on her ears. Sunburn? Or...is she embarrassed? With her transparent face that Rey usually hides beneath a rancher’s hat, left behind for her woman's disguise...there are no helpful shadows to bely her blush now.

Embarrassed by what he’s seen of her?

She’s not embarrassed over her half-nakedness with Tico. Ren’s tiny flicker of pleasure dies.

He’s been gone only a few weeks, and _what the hell’s happened?_

“She likes him,” Leia says. She holds his chestnut’s reins while Ren drops down from his saddle, scowling. They’re alone beside the shanty’s porch for the moment, Rey's co-conspirators having followed her to the barn. “Finn.”

“No, she likes Tico,” he snaps as repressively as he can. He can't bear her goading, not on this—but he’s damned if he’s going to have this conversation with Leia Organa.

“I _meant_ Tico.” Leia sighs while Ren untacks his mare.

His fingers fumble on the girth straps. “What?”

“She likes Finn. Tico. _Tico_ does.”

“ _Tico?_ But Tico’s—”

“A woman, Ben. Use your eyes! How can you not—she looks at Finn the way you look at Rey. Sunshine all over her face when she thinks no one will see.”

“I don’t look—”

“I’m your mother,” she calls his bluff.

Ren has no response to that. He digs a nail angrily into seams in his saddlebags' leather.

After a moment Leia continues, apropos of nothing, “It was a nice dress, the one Rey wore today.”

Ren grunts, digging deeper until his nail bends. Pain shoots up his knuckle.

“She didn’t have to wear something like that for jailbreaking. She chose to.”

“Just a disguise,” he mutters.

“But one that she selected, Ben. She looked very pretty.”

“Not like she usually looks.” He takes refuge in a frown while he works through the information Leia’s hurled at him like a balm and a spear at once. Because Tico...and Rey...friends, not lovers. Rounded cheeks and a plump mouth. Yes, he sees it now, but hardly trusts himself to hope— _friends_. Friendship is almost as extraordinary as a lover for the Rey he knows. But a hard, green, apple-sized knot swelling under his ribs eases slightly.

He breathes.

“What she wore for her disguise, that's as she could’ve been,” Leia says. “When she was young and didn’t know better than to ask, she came to Sweet Springs looking for help or work. Even at twelve she was beautiful, and she had no idea. Phasma offered her a place in the dancehall. She thought she’d be dancing.”

“What?” His nail snaps off in the saddlebag seam, but Ren hardly feels its sting.

“This was after you’d left. She reminded me of you, Ben. So desperate and hungry—in different ways, of course. So I talked to her and steered her to Maz instead of Phasma for work and a hot meal. It was better, safer until she returned to her ranch and made her claim. Her choice.”

“She never told me.”

“And what have you told her?” His mother’s eyes are impossibly gentle, ancient and knowing as stars. Ren looks away. “You owe her something, Ben. After what she’s done for you.”

“She did it for you.”

“For me?” Leia's laughter is almost tender, and a little mocking. “No, sweetheart. I was in that cell for years. You were there for less than a month. She agreed to break you out in a matter of days. She did it, too. Haven’t you asked yourself why?”

Of course he has. Over and over, tossing from side to side when he couldn’t sleep on the jail's sour mattress, turning the question around in his skull like a grindstone. But he still doesn’t believe the most obvious answer, because he knows Rey. He knows how guilt binds her to a course of action beyond any reasonable stopping point—tending his leg long after she could’ve sent him away without incriminating herself in the injury.

She’s broken him out because she knows he’s not guilty of the crime for which he was meant to hang. Only that. Not because of anything else.

“She doesn’t…” Ren flounders. How can he explain this, all of this—all of her? “I know she doesn't…”

“She blushes when she knows you’re looking at her. She watches you when she thinks you won’t see. The same way you do with her. I knew something must’ve happened between you for her to agree to break you from jail, but this...oh, Ben. Neither of you know, do you?”

“I—”

“You never would’ve known, if it had remained the two of you alone.” Leia’s laughter and smile fade. “I know you don’t want me here. Perhaps you wish I’d stayed in jail, after what I’ve done. I wouldn’t blame you. I know that you’re angry with me, Ben. You have every right to be. But I hope this...I hope knowing this makes you happy.”

 _No_. She doesn’t get to confess. She doesn’t get to be sorry. She doesn’t get to be forgiven.

“Well, it doesn’t!” Ren snarls. “It’s not true.”

“You’re scared of what it would mean. But your fear doesn’t eclipse the truth. Don’t hurt her more than you already have by being afraid.”

“She’s the one who’s sent me away, who—”

“Brought you home.” Leia tilts her head at Rey’s claim shanty: roof battened and snug with shingles that Ren planed. She nods at Rey herself, emerging from the barn with a bundle holding her blue satin dress, face rubbed clean of rouge and powder. “Tell her you like the dress. She’s embarrassed about it. _Tell her_ , Ben.”

“Tell me what?” Rey glances between Ren and Leia. But then a faint color blossoms over her sharp, freckled cheekbones. She looks away, fingers kneading her bundle. “Never mind.”

“I—” Ren starts.

Rey stalks past him with her face turned down—and then Finn and Tico are approaching from the stable too, Finn brushing alfalfa dander from his companion’s queue; the moment melts away.

If there was ever a moment to begin with.

But he wants to know.

Still: trusting Leia Organa? Only an idiot would. She tells her listeners what they want to hear to get what _she_ wants.

So what the hell does Leia Organa want with Kylo Ren just now? With Rey? Because his mother gives a meaningful tug to his sleeve, dragging him over to the porch where the others have congregated on its edge and steps. Tico sits beside Rey, their bare ankles brushing from time to time while they swing their legs. Sitting lower on the steps, Finn leans on Tico’s far side with his elbow propped next to her hip. It’s clearly a comfortable configuration for them, one they’ve assumed many times in the past weeks.

The knot in Ren’s ribs twists tight again.

He and Leia Organa aren’t part of this routine.

Not that his mother acknowledges this.

“What’s the next plan?” she inquires in a brisk voice. She seats herself on the steps, leaving Ren as the only one still standing with his hands drooping awkwardly at his sides. She glances around, ready and expectant.

Rey’s eyebrows crease over her nose. Its tip is slightly sunburned. “Wait, I suppose. We'll keep our heads down. Dameron should've planned things so that he’ll be the one making rounds across the homesteads to search out anyone who’s escaped the jail—if Hux will even admit that he’s lost prisoners. He might not. I destroyed the logbooks fairly thoroughly, so he has some excuse. He could just cancel Ren’s trial and carry on with his other plans.”

“Indeed. Armitage Hux won’t wish to accept responsibility for a failure.” Leia nods approvingly at Rey.

“So?” Ren cuts between them, shoving his gawky hands into his trousers’ pockets. “Now what? We’re just supposed to stay here?”

“You’re welcome to leave,” Rey says.

“We could go to Luke’s claim,” Leia suggests with an tart tone that reproaches them both for their words—and _hell_ no. “His cabin is far up in the mountains. Not even Hux will think to search so far afield for fugitives.”

“Who’s Luke?” Finn asks.

“My brother.” Leia nods briefly to include him in the conversation. “We could be safe with him. He may be something of a hermit, but he’s an excellent shot. And a good man.” She raises her eyebrows. Her gaze sweeps across the little palaver gathered on Rey’s porch. Willing acquiescence.

_No._

“I’m not going.” Ren’s voice is too loud, his refusal too fast.

“Neither am I,” Rey echoes him after a moment. Her eyes meet his with a flicker of tawny irises, then skitter away. She clears her throat. “They’re not after me any more than usual, and I can’t leave the ranch. Besides, I can look after myself. Defend myself.”

“I’ve no doubt that you can, dear girl. But wouldn’t it be better—”

“No.”

“But you should go,” Finn says to Ren after an uncomfortable pause, while Rey’s contradiction sits flat and heavy in the air. “You and Mrs. Organa. Tico, Rey, and I, we’d be fine. We’ve been fine.”

“I’m not going,” Ren repeats between gritted teeth, tasting blood from his lip. “I’m never asking that bastard for—”

Apparently, his mother’s glare still has some ability to silence him; fuming, he chokes off without finishing his invectives.

“Luke is your family,” she says. “He would try to help us.”

“Like he tried before? Look how that turned out!”

A sudden vibrant interest radiating off Finn and Tico is palpable and sticky, like walking through dew-strung cobwebs. At least Rey tries to conceal her curiosity, looking down at her hands and picking her nails. But everything about this conversation is one massive _no_.

Goddamn Luke Skywalker, with his silent meditation and his communing with nature! His breathtaking ignorance.

“Well, he’s probably dead, anyhow. Living alone out there for so long. One lucky rattlesnake or that donkey stepping on his foot—”

“There are ways,” Rey unexpectedly interrupts Ren's list of punishments for his uncle, her voice soft but cruel as steel. She’s looking straight at him. Finally. And why? To send him away again. “He could still be there. There are ways to survive.”

Ren glares back into those lovely copper eyes, still rimmed in charcoal where Rey hasn’t managed to wipe off all her paint. Then he turns on a heel and tugs his mare away from her grazing near the porch, hauling her to the stable with her neck extended in protest. She’s going to get the rubdown of her damn life. Behind him, Leia sighs.

Currying and brushing her chestnut coat for the first time in weeks, Ren works over his mare for more an hour. He picks gobs of muck from her hooves. He wipes out her nostrils and cleans the gummy corners of her eyes. He brushes her again and again until oils rise in her skin, brightening her dull hide to a true red-gold. He even attempts to pick burrs from her mane and tail. The mare’s grateful for his attention, offering little nickers even when he yanks at her wiry hairs. Even when he’s distracted. He’s grateful for her gratitude. With her, he can at least do something right.

“Are you going to be an ass about this?” he asks Millie when his mare looks with dark-eyed longing toward the barn’s hay bales. He nods at the chestnut. Millie blows through her nostrils and lowers her head; Ren takes this as license to stable his mare alongside the mule. He forks two alfalfa flakes into the manger, but warns his mount, “Don’t get comfortable.”

The mare whuffles. She nudges her nose against Millie’s. Millie squeals a little threat to bite, but without malice.

“Huh,” Ren snorts at the pair of them.

He’s polishing his reclaimed tack on the sawhorse, rubbing as though the leather’s done him a grievous injury that can only be redressed by copious abrasions with lanolin soap and burlap, when the barn doors creak on their hinges. A shadow droops across the chaff-lined floor. Boots, trousers. Ren stops when he reaches a pair of narrow hips. He glares back down at his saddlehorn.

“Are…” Rey stands just over the threshold. Her shadow twists its hands. “Are you…”

“Staying?” Ren scoffs to make it clear how little he cares. “Not if you don’t want me.”

“...all right?” she finishes, and he feels like an idiot.

“Did Leia put you up to this?” He can’t help raising his eyes, just for a moment.

Rey scowls at him, which Ren takes to be a _yes_. She hops onto a feed barrel a little more clumsily than her ordinary functional grace would predict. Her boots thunk against the cask's sides in an irritatingly arhythmic tempo. Settling onto her seat, her heels continue to kick. Perhaps she’s not even aware of her movements.

All the same, skin on his nape crinkles. Ren hunches his shoulders.

“Oh. Sorry.” Rey stills her legs. But she continues to frown at him.

He sighs, debating on one breath and deciding on his next that _yes_ , it’ll just be better to get this out of the way. “I don’t know what she told you—”

“She didn’t have to say anything. It’s the way she looks at me. Like she expects something, and I don’t know what it is. So I’ll try everything!”

Ren huffs through blown-out cheeks. _So Leia didn’t tell her._ He nearly smiles in his relief when he says, “It’s not just you. She does it to everyone.”

“I suppose she’s trying to be nice, though. She’s always been nice to me.”

He doesn’t know what to say to something like this from her, all abrupt and unexpected. So casually tacked onto the end of a sentence. Rey, referencing her past? It’s not the right time—he knows it’s not, when there are other things that need to be said first. But he burns to ask her a thousand questions, and he’s afraid to even open his mouth in case they come surging out anyway. Because he always, always says the wrong thing. Not like Leia Organa, who always has the right words. So he can’t speak. But—

“Thank you.” His mother’s words, when he’s lost his own. _Thank her._ “Thank you for...getting me out.”

Rey’s heels make another thunk against her barrel. Just once. A nervous twitch. “Oh. I...you’re welcome?”

It’s slightly easier to continue, now that he’s begun. Ren says, “For the morphine. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And for the dress.”

 _Oh, hell._ What a damnably stupid thing to say. Ren wishes he could take back his words like swallowing vomit—right until the split second that he glances up and meets Rey’s eyes.

“Y-you’re…” Color stains her cheeks, bright as sun-kissed peonies in the stable’s shadow. “You l-liked...I thought it was...I mean...” But then Rey gulps in turn and holds his gaze. She says without stammering, “You’re welcome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goodness gracious...did they just have another bonding moment in the barn? Will they have...other things...in the barn???
> 
> Note: I'll be in Europe for the next couple weeks and pretty much unplugging, so the next RESS update probably won't be going up until 11/11/18. :( But hey, at least I didn't leave you on a cliffhanger this time, right?
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	16. Chapter 16

The night is...crowded.

Limbs tangled through her blankets, skin slick with a sheen of summer sweat, Rey scowls against the evening’s gentle, breathing quiet. She scowls at hiccoughing frogs from the creek. She scowls at clicking cicadas emerging in the season’s first heatwave, at the rustle of grazing cattle. She scowls at the soft patter of jackrabbits hopping through her herd, their clever eyes golden and their long ears twitching in the grass. Her mouth aches with frowning. It’s a perfect night. Peaceful. Undisturbed by hunting buffalo wolves now that Rey’s calves are strong enough to run with the herd, no rifles or shotguns sounding a warning of intruders stalking near. Her own shotgun leans beside the shanty door, loaded but with its action idle.

Yes, a perfect night.

And she can’t sleep, tossing and turning, sweating and grimacing at the soft, dark air.

Because it’s crowded.

She’s alone in her shanty, of course. None of the fugitives would presume to sleep within its unchinked walls, to claim her rocking chair, bed, or even a comfortable patch of flooring for repose. No, though she offered her mattress to Leia during their first night on the ranch together, gathering up her quilt and preparing to bed down on the porch happily enough—only to have the other woman shake her head with a fond, tired smile. As though Rey’s foolish to even suggest such a thing.

“Dear girl, this is your bed, and you’ll sleep on it. Isn’t there a proverb to that effect? Besides, I don’t suppose I’d be able to rest these old bones on such a soft mattress. Not after all these years. And though your cabin is everything charming, light filtering through its boards is so much like...bars. No, I’ll be very comfortable with the others in the barn or sleeping outside myself. It’s been so long since I’ve seen stars.” She’d accepted a coarse horse blanket, but nothing more. Then she’d retreated, leaving Rey standing with awkward, hanging hands.

Naturally, Rey hadn’t suggested that Ren cross her threshold to take the bed again.

_Thank you...and for the dress._

No way in _hell_.

Turning over for the thousandth time in as many minutes, she pummels her pillow. But it’s never been a particularly pleasant cushion. Punching the straw into an obliging shape gives her something to do with her fists, rather than any real hope of digging out a soothing hollow to rest her head.

She can’t get comfortable.

Because despite the fact that her fugitives have bedded down in the stable or the yard, despite the fact that she’s alone in her shanty—with room to toss and turn as much as she likes, to stand and stretch, or pace the floor until she’s driven splinters into her toes—summer's darkness is still suffocatingly overfull in her body. Not just from the warm air drawn into her chest on every laboring breath, but from the thump and sigh of too many pulses. Too many exhaling lungs. _Too near._ She can’t hear these things, really. She knows she can’t. But Rey feels those pulses all around her in the damp night. Sweat wells up over her skin, trickling between fine hairs on her nape and arms. The dell between her legs is soaked through, and an unhemmed nightshirt chafes her thighs.

Finn and Rose? She’s worried about keeping them so close in the past weeks. But she’s worked herself hard in planning the jailbreak, and slept through her itching nerves. She’s had to. To keep herself sharp. Yes: by necessity, by force of will against fearful and ingrained habit, she’s slept.

Leia Organa? She sees too much that Rey would rather conceal, yet she holds her tongue. For now.

And Kylo Ren.

He’s back on her ranch, and Rey can’t sleep.

That damn dress. If only she’d gone through with the Sweet Springs plot in her trousers and shirtwaist, none of...this...between her thighs would be happening. Torturing her. She’d be able to sleep as she’s made herself rest before. And she truly does need sleep and a clear head, if she’s to plan for her next endeavor in defending herself and hers: taking down the railway locomotive. Not getting caught and hauled off behind bars for some cotton-minded miscalculation or a detail left to chance, her land snatched away. Everything taken from her again.

But this...feeling, it’s more than sweat. It’s _heat_. A mirror of sensations from the river that allowed her to slip beneath chilly, babbling water and ghost her fingers over her stomach, down to clustering curls between her thighs. That same feeling—even if she’s hot under her blankets rather than drifting in cold currents.

He’s as near in her stable as he was beyond the bank while she bathed.

But Rey doesn’t seek that relief she’d found within the river. It’s different, now. Those words between them in the barn. _Thank you. You’re welcome._ A give and a take. The callused roughness of her own fingers between her legs isn’t enough anymore.

She knows this already. She knows better than to try again.

Rey hates a weakness that sends her hands lowering, touching, tasting anyhow. She bears the night as best she can. She has to. Palms clutched flat between her thighs, she holds herself still. Steady. Waiting until there’s word that she’s safe to begin again with her work. And other things.

Misery _._

Fortunately, Poe Dameron arrives early in the next afternoon. A single day of expectation and dawdling, and Rey's aged a year. Not looking, not touching, avoiding everyone from the stable as she goes about her chores. They work and bathe and eat, but she just works. She shuns even Rose, whose face crumples with confusion at her coldness and turned shoulders. And then smoothes in understanding.

It's awful.

So Rey clasps her hands around her pitchfork and thanks the sweet lord when Poe Dameron finally comes.

At the first signs of a rider approaching through the lowlands, dust plumes spiraling up from galloping hooves as his mount rounds a stand of pinnacles at the bottom of Rey’s grazing slopes, she sends the fugitives into her barn. It’s supposed to be Dameron coming to check the homesteads for jailbirds, but if it isn’t...

“Hide, quickly. In the bales, under the blankets. Keep quiet.” She hustles her company away from the porch where they’ve been taking an ordinary midday meal of beans, mincemeat, and peppers from a pan, their lips and fingers sticky with sliced melon. Rey peels her eyes toward the rider while she urges them down the steps. “I’ll come for you again when it’s safe. _Stay_.”

Finn and Rose hurry for their hay bales without protest, Rose gripping her companion's elbow to steer him on. Leia follows them across the yard, eyes lingering briefly on Rey’s face before passing to Ren. The woman gives a tiny, cryptic nod when she strides off—whether for Rey or her son, Rey doesn’t know. She doesn’t like not knowing, but before she can challenge Leia Organa to explain this enigmatic gesture—

“ _Rey._ ” Ren, still beside her at the porch steps. His voice, asking. His boots, shuffling through the grass.

“No. Hide.”

“I’m staying.”

Rey doesn't glance over her shoulder at his shadowed figure, though her ears prick with his every shift in weight. She fits slugs into the shotgun braced on her knee, squinting against an afternoon glare while the approaching rider grows from a dusty speck and into hints of detail—hat, holster, a glint of spurs. “This isn't your time for revenge, Ren.”

“I’m not looking for revenge. I—”

“ _Go_.” Rey pumps her gun’s action. “I can look after myself.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” he mutters.

“I won’t be able to lie even badly if you’re here in the open. Go.”

“You’ll—”

“I’m not going to scream for your help, no. Because _I don’t need it._ ”

Palms smearing gleaming sheens of sweat along her shotgun's barrel, Rey steels herself to look up. She's prepared to meet a gaze as uncompromising as the gun on her hip. But Ren’s face...it's too open beneath his beard and unruly hair when her eyes find his. And this is worse than the fight she’s readied herself to have to force him away into the barn. Sunlight sparks off his irises, speckling their coffee-brown hue with gold. Barely parted within his tangled beard, his lips curl into an unhappy, worried frown. Despite scrubbing off the jail's filth, he hasn’t shaved.

 _A knife, a river._ And—

_Thank you._

Her stomach’s hollow ache swells, filling with something else besides hot, dark, suffocating loneliness. Ren stands beside her while the rider gallops closer up the hill toward her shanty. Closer still. He waits. But instead of shouting or hissing at his recklessness, at his seeming imperative to get them all killed, Rey’s harsh command for Ren to make himself scarce is simply a whisper:

“Please, go.”

He holds her gaze, amber-eyed. Then he goes.

Rey only breathes when the stable doors swing shut and she’s alone on her porch. Posed with her shotgun and a hand on her hip, she waits for the rider to come with threats or messages about fugitives from Sweet Springs' jail. Ready for the worst: Canady, or even Hux.

But praise the sweet lord, it really is Poe Dameron. A silver star flashes from his lapel as he reins in beside her steps. He’s been deputized _._

“Miss Ridley?” he inquires, as though he doesn’t know. Dameron must be following an interrogation script that Hux will’ve laid out in his office, the questions designed to extract information from ignorant, illiterate homesteaders without revealing more of Sweet Springs' disastrous disorder than necessary. Dismounting, Dameron tips his hat and winks at Rey. Enjoying the pantomime, inviting her to play along.

“Mr. Dameron.” Rey only gives him a stiff nod.

She’s intensely aware of unseen eyes observing her from behind knotholes or loose boards in the stable. Of gazes narrowed for treachery. Watching her, and watching Dameron. Her shotgun’s stock slips beneath her moist palms. She’s nearly as nervous as she’d be if Dameron were really scouting for fugitives on her land. If he'd reined up and begun his interrogation when she’d hidden those fugitives in a barn not ten yards distant, barely a minute before. If Ren misinterprets even the slightest signal between herself and the deputized gunslinger, he’ll burst out from the stable and lunge at Dameron with grasping hands. She knows this as she knows the thundering pulse of her heartbeat in her ears. Dameron won’t betray her by lashing Ren to his stirrups and dragging him back to jail, but she needs to keep a perilous peace between these men if she’s to succeed.

Which means that neither of them can choke out the other.

“Why are you here?” she forces herself to say now with prickly calm. _Play along._ “You know I don’t like company.”

“Apologies for the inconvenience. I’m following up on some folks’ concerns about the railway line, Miss Ridley.”

“Concerns?”

“Sweet Springs' mayor is keen to reassure folks on ranches outside the town that they have his attention and support, should they encounter...difficulties...from the line. Nothing very detrimental's expected from such civilizing progress, of course, but he wants to be sure that no one has felt themselves inconvenienced by supply wagons, earthquakes, explosions, runaways, bandits, murderers, or pack mules. They can bray quite loudly, I hear.” Dameron presents his list of possible disasters in a flat, quick monotone, disguising the worst effects in a sea of triviality while his nostrils thin with an effort not to laugh.

Rey’s shotgun bucks under her own sour amusement. Hux has turned his meeting with her into an advantage, pretending interest in ranchers and homesteaders to give his deputies an excuse to intrude, poke, and pry around shanties and barns, all under the guise of benevolent mayoral outreach. She almost admires it.

“No, Mr. Dameron,” she says. “I haven't encountered those nuisances.”

Dameron inclines his head, as though making note of her answer for the mayor’s tallies.

“But you already know my difficulties.”

“Indeed, Miss Ridley. Everything's secure on your ranch?”

“Yes.”

Grinning, Dameron removes the brash silver star pinned onto his jacket. It’s an insignia of temporary deputization; Hux could hardly have refused after the gunslinger's services with the jail explosion. “Good. Since I can make a satisfactory report to my betters now, what’s the plan to tear it all down?”

Seeing his eyebrows cock toward her shanty, barn, smokehouse, and even the privy, Rey shrugs. “Wait here.”

“Is everything all right?” Leia asks when she eases back the barn door. Rey’s careful to block the opening with her body—Ren will have to overrun her to give his knuckles a crack at Dameron's face.

“Fine. Dameron’s doing homestead surveys on this side of the valley, just as he thought. He’s been deputized for the job and everything. But his star’s off now, and we need to use what time we have together.” Rey eyes Ren’s looming shadow glowering behind his mother, Finn, and Rose. “Will that be a problem?”

“Who else did you think would come?” Leia asks her son without breaking her gaze from Rey. Convincing them to hold to the plan, even with raised hackles all around. “Hux himself? Sheriff Canady? Or were you hoping that your men would show themselves?”

A wordless, hideous struggle contorts Ren’s jaw, wrenching his mouth into a scowl that’s positively demonic beneath his snarled beard. Something wooden creaks a protest at his stranglehold; he’s seized Rey’s pitchfork for a truncheon. “They—”

“Left you,” Rey says. A brutal guess because it’s likely true, but there’s no time to be gentle. Dameron waits by her porch, shifting his weight at the delay when Rey’s promised ready allies. His spurs glint and clink. She continues, “They left you behind, didn’t they? None of us have, Ren. But if you’re not going to cooperate, you need to leave. Alone. So make your choice, because there’s no one else coming.”

_Please lord, let no one else come._

She gives him to a count of ten pounding heartbeats for his choice. _Ten. Nine. Seven. Three. One—_

“The man’s a bastard.” Ren’s voice is abrupt and ragged, as though the insult’s been wrung from him against his will. But wood creaks again as he eases his grip on the pitchfork.

“Hmm,” Leia lilts. “Well, if that’s the worst you’ll do.” She nods at Rey, who steps back from her braced stance on the barn threshold.

Letting in the light.

“Dameron,” Rey calls, “meet everyone. Everyone, this is Poe Dameron. We’re going to blow up the railway locomotive.”

The gunslinger’s eyes bulge beneath his Stetson, but he keeps his silence and his position beside the porch. Good.Silence means he’s considering. Considering how this plot could destabilize Hux’s corrupt regime. One thumb skims his belt. The other brushes along his Colt’s holster.

Even better.

Winking and shading their faces against a brilliant midday sun, Leia, Finn, Rose, and Ren shuffle from the stable. They cross the yard between the barn and Rey’s porch, where Dameron stands with one booted heel cocked on the steps and both thumbs now hooked through his belt. It’s a good pose, Rey admits. Watching him like this, she can hardly tell that she’s just dropped a bombshell revelation about her true purpose behind the jailbreak. He hasn’t said _no._ Her eyes sneak sideways to find Ren glaring thunderheads against Dameron’s calm, masterful stance, a hand tugging at his wild beard while Dameron’s cheeks and chin are smooth with barber’s balm. And then she tracks Dameron’s gaze...not to Ren, but to Finn.

Finn returns Dameron’s stare with wary, dark-eyed defiance, lips compressed so that a dimple forms in his jaw. Tracing that same look, Rose takes a crabbed step sideways, edging her shoulder before Finn’s. Protective, the corners of her mouth twisting while she frowns back at the gunslinger.

But Dameron’s look isn’t suspicious. His eyes rove over the contours of Finn’s face, visibly tracing the lines of his cheeks, the curves of his ears. The swell of his lower lip.

“You’re one of the folks who set off the explosion,” the gunslinger says, half a grin quirking his mouth. “You had a bandana on.”

Finn nods. His hand comes up on Rose’s arm. Holding her back.

“Good work, man.”

“His name’s Finn,” Rose cuts in. An impatient twitch of her shoulders frees her from Finn’s restraint. She steps forward, thrusting out an aggressive hand. “And I’m Tico.”

“Poe Dameron,” Dameron replies with a charming tip of his hat. It doesn’t thaw Rose one iota, and she lets him know it.

“Tico’s the one who’s good with explosives,” Finn adds, looking over her head at Dameron while Rose just about wrings the gunslinger’s arm off.

Cocking an eyebrow, Dameron glances down at the small, fierce woman, at her capable and tiny hands trying to crush his. “I’ll bet you are, darling.”

Leia chuckles. She attempts unconvincingly to turn the noise into a cough when Rose swivels to glower at her. Mouth slack, Finn shakes his head at Leia’s laughter and Dameron’s endearment.

_Oh, Rose. Why Finn?_

It’s very awkward, but at least Ren has stuck to an ominous quiet rather than launching into threats or invectives. No one’s come to fisticuffs—unless Rey counts Rose’s vicious assault on Dameron’s fingers. Which...perhaps. These introductions could’ve gone worse. So:

“Since that’s out of the way—”

“We’re not finished.”

_Damn it._

Ren sidesteps his mother and approaches Dameron, dwarfing both Rose and the shorter man with his shoulders’ bulk. His massive fists remain clenched at his sides—not offering a handshake. “We’ve got business.”

“Do we?” Dameron’s smirk isn’t the wisest expression he could’ve adopted, Rey thinks privately.

“You’re a bastard, Dameron. If Rey didn’t insist on accepting your help, I’d—”

“Still with the _bastards_? Really, Solo?” Dameron steps up onto the first porch stair where he’s cocked a boot, raising himself closer to Ren’s towering height. “You got the name—which you’ve discarded. You could’ve had everything else, too. But you chose to throw all that away, now didn’t you?”

“Boys,” Leia starts in a panther's growling purr.

Rey would’ve used her knuckles. And _Solo_?

“Even after all this time, you’re still angry that I took what you didn’t want? That your mother listened to me? Me, a bastard? You think that word hurts? It doesn’t, Solo. Because I have _everything_ you don’t!”

“You were the goddamn sheriff when it all went down, and you knew I didn’t—”

“ _I_ had those posters printed!” Leia abandons her purr and strides forward to jab her fingers against their chests. _Finally._ “Not Poe. So stop this, both of you. Stop this right now. We don’t have time for you to rehash a fight from when you were barely more than boys. A foolish fight! If you hadn’t rushed so easily to take offense, you might’ve been companions. Even friends. It’s what I wanted for you! My sheriff and my son, two men I should’ve been able to trust when others began to turn on me. But no. No, neither of you could put aside your petty differences for something better and more important. You still can’t! You’re still embarrassing me, and embarrassing yourselves. Look.” Reaching up onto her toes, she grabs Dameron and Ren by their jaws and forcibly turns their heads to where Rey, Finn, and Rose are watching the pissing contest with wide eyes and pinched mouths.

“Apologize. _Now._ ”

Despite Leia's hold twisting his neck into a painful crick, Ren’s eyes find Rey’s in an instant—but then they fall and skitter aside.

 _No_. She won’t pity him. Not for this. Rey scowls when he won’t hold her gaze; she wants him to bear the full force of her disgust. Because, _really_? He still hates Dameron over a boyhood squabble for Leia Organa’s notice? That’s all? A child feeling threatened by the youthful sheriff under Leia’s mayor, who occupied her time so that she missed dinners, birthdays, and holidays with her son and husband? Ren's a fool.

But...if Rey could bring back her family...would she be jealous of a charismatic outsider charming away her parents’ attention?

The truth is bitter. Yes, she would’ve been as a girl. And she would be today, too.

So:

“It doesn’t matter,” Rey says into Dameron and Ren's unrepentant silence. To them, and to herself. “All that matters is that we stop the railway. Neither of you ever have to see each other again after that. None of us do.” She stomps over to the porch and thunks down with her shotgun braced beside her, glaring expectantly for the others to gather round. "Let's begin."

With a few dark looks and mutters, they shuffle forward into an approximation of a circle. Ren shoulder-checks Dameron as he steps over to lean against a post beside Rey. Rose plants herself between Dameron and Finn with a rattle that makes the boards sing against their nails. Rey breathes out through her nose, trying to ignore a palpable strain running through each of her companions’ shoulders. It’s as though they’re all connected with the live wires that Hux is rigging along Main Street for electric lamps; her skin thrums and prickles. But the sky’s clear, no hint of a summer thunderstorm on the horizon to account for the air’s twinkling static haze.

Distrust, unease. A tension that’s...that’s the way wolves size up competitors, hackles roused, teeth bared for control of territory and a pack.

Or a mate.

Which is well and good with wolves, but not on Rey’s porch.

“Hux told me that his railway line was scheduled to be completed in a month’s time.” She holds her scratching fingers in check when she’d really like to rend something for relief. “That was about three weeks ago. Which means our timeline’s around a week. But before we go further—Dameron, are you with us?”

Ren snorts. “Well done. Now he’ll go skulking back to curry favor—”

“Shut up, Solo.” Dameron’s tone is pointedly weary, as though he finds Ren's antics childish and tiring. “I’m in, sweetheart. You probably already know that.”

Rey ignores Ren’s disgusted gesture. She asks Dameron over his muttered invectives, “Does that schedule dovetail with what you know about the line?”

“There’s construction happening on a station platform at the town's north side. Last time I checked, it was getting painted over with a second coat, all ready for Hux’s grand ribbon-cutting fiesta. So yes, it’ll be soon.”

“All right. Finn or Tico, can either of you narrow it down further?”

Memory's brutal lash ridges tendons in Finn's neck. “Given the pace we had to keep with laying track, I’d say it’ll be about a week. We were only four or five miles east from Sweet Springs when the explosion went off.”

“Otherwise, we wouldn’t have made it to Rey’s ranch.” Rose nods. “Say four miles for our tightest timeline, subtract the work that’s happened since then, and we've got five days or so before all the track’s laid. The train’ll come soon after that. It moves a lot faster than supply wagons driving out from the next town east.”

Dameron whistles at her calculations. “Christ. And you two were on the line?”

“We...escaped. We were lucky. Others weren't.”

“I saw them when I filched the nitro. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry for us. Be sorry for all the others. We’re free, and we’re not going back." Rose's eyes glitter. "We’re going to tear the whole thing down.”

“Or blow it up,” Finn chimes in.

Dameron grins. “Definitely. You still have some of that nitro left?”

Rose scoffs at his stupidity. “No. That bottle was tiny. Probably a good thing, though. Anything more would’ve leveled the jail. A jug? That’d take down a hillside. That’s why the overseers have it. We've had to blast through mountains for a flat route before, and mine metals when it took too long ship out steel from the cities.”

Silent disgust curls Ren’s mouth while he listens to this clipped report. Though he keeps a boil of words at bay, Rey reads them plain as glass behind his narrowed, hooded eyes.

 _Stinking buffalo carcasses, dust storms, contaminated riverways._ She shudders.

“It wasn't us.” His smile at Dameron vanishing, Finn rises instead to Rose's defense against Ren's unspeaking accusation. “It was the overseers.”

“Not the overseers. The company,” Leia says. “It will be stockholders pushing the work along, seeking corners to cut for a profit.”

“And the railway company’s executive. Tobias Snoke. Even Hux gives his hair an extra greasing before telegraphing the head office. Though whether it’s because he’s afraid of the bastard or primping is anyone’s guess.” Dameron's mouth makes a moue of distaste. “Like Snoke can even see him. Anyway, this railroad’s supposed to finally fulfill his big-talking campaign promises against Mrs. Organa. Order to the territories, and all that. He hasn’t done much else except piss off all those folks who make a living doing something other than wearing stock ties and spats to an office at 9 o’clock every morning. About half the town, really. He could be hoping that people like us will just ride back east on the line. Then he’ll have the Sweet Springs he’s always wanted. Stamped in his own slimy image.”

“What a terrible thought.” Leia grimaces. “Sweet Springs was supposed to be a place of liberty, of sanctuary, a wellspring to start afresh away from all the city mores...So this is why you wanted to jailbreak the railway saboteur, Rey. To stop Armitage Hux.”

Rey shrugs. _Near enough_. “But that person was never in a cell.”

“It was my sister,” Rose says flatly. “I helped. We did it. I’ll do it again.”

“Even if we don’t have nitroglycerin on hand,” Rey cuts in quickly before a bright-eyed Dameron presses Rose for horrific details, “there’s whiskey for making other explosives.”

“How the _hell_ do you know about that?”

Craning back her neck, Rey incinerates Ren with a scathing look. She’ll never answer questions about that whiskey. Her guilt, and her shame. She continues,

“We'll find out where the nitroglycerin’s being stored or guarded after the jail explosion. If it's still on the worksite, we won’t have to steal more. Just set it off when the locomotive passes the wagon, or crate, or tent. I want the engine to be unsalvageable. It’ll be more expensive to replace than the tracks, won't it? And whiskey explosives can wreck the rails for a few hundred feet."

“How much whiskey do you have?” Dameron whistles again, eyebrows raised so high that his Stetson tilts up on his forehead.

No, Rey’s not answering that question from Poe Dameron, either. Ren smirks at her mutinous silence. Which makes Rey want to smack him. She sits on her hands to dampen the potent temptation; giving in would make her no better than a squabbling child. No better than Kylo Ren.

“Enough,” is her safe reply. “I have rags and tinder, too.”

“But we’ll need to be on the line to set off our explosives. That's the trouble,” Rose says.

“Too dangerous.” Finn shakes his head.

Dameron strokes a considering palm over his chin. “Not if we plant them beforehand. The charges could be triggered at a distance. No one has to be nearby. The blasts should go off if we hit the bottles with a rifle round or two." He nods at Rey, catching his hat when it finally slips off his mahogany curls. “We're good shots.”

“And me,” Ren interjects.

“Sure.” The gunslinger smiles too widely, spinning his Stetson on a middle finger. “Where’s your piece, again? Pretty little Winchester, wasn’t it? Great for marksmanship. But...you lost it, didn’t you?”

Rey elbows Ren in the ribs to break off his retort. He grunts and staggers. So, her jab may’ve been more of an uppercut into his gut. Well, he deserves it. If she could reach Dameron, she’d do the same to him.

Pointedly clearing her throat and ignoring Ren’s labored breathing, she says, “Mrs. Organa, can you shoot? We’ll need marksmen all along the line to set off explosives. Running from charge to charge will be tricky if we’re shooting from the ridge. I want to destroy the tracks behind the locomotive as it comes, so it can’t reverse away.”

Leia's mouth twists into a grin smaller than Dameron’s, but just as wicked. “Oh yes, I can. I learned from the best. Han wasn’t pleased about it, but I studied with Maz when we first came out to the town.”

Maz Kanata, the quickest, sharpest draw in Sweet Springs. Likely in the whole territories.

“We need to get you a gun, then.”

“I’d like that.”

“Tico? Finn?”

The fugitives exchange a loaded glance. Finn grips Rose’s knee. Her fingers dig into his shoulder. A moment, and then they nod their understanding at each other.

“No,” Rose says to the others. “Not for us. Guns kill and I won’t...no.”

“That's all right." Rey smiles a little at her. "Dameron, can you get Ren’s Winchester? It was taken from the jail effects lock-up.”

The gunslinger sighs. “I...may’ve confiscated it, myself.”

A shocked, infuriated stillness from Ren. Then—

“ _You fucker!_ ” he roars, lunging for Dameron.

Rey sticks out her shotgun’s butt as he lurches away from his porch post, catching his left ankle. Ren staggers and sprawls into the dirt at her feet.

“Get him his Winchester,” she says to the gunslinger.

The look that Ren sends her from beneath tousled, loam-strewn hair hanging into his eyes makes Rey want to hit something again. Possibly him. To fist her hands in his river-washed shirt. Haul him off to a secluded grassy patch behind her shanty. Drag him down beside her. Scrape her knife along his jaw. Rasp away his beard. Press into his fingers cupping her thighs.

Or break his nose.

Face baking under his gaze, freckles unflatteringly stark against a brash flush overbearing her cheeks, Rey can’t decide which. Because it’s her own head being mobbed with too many pulses and laborious breaths, now—though perhaps it’s always been her mind that’s crowded, not her ranch.

But then...the corner of Ren’s mouth curls.

And she knows what she wants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooooh boy...Rey knowing what she wants generally means Rey deciding to get what she wants...and then getting it...
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my gosh, my darling [@alicestill](http://alicestill.tumblr.com/) (sunbug1138 here on AO3) made the most incredible cover art for RESS! Check it out [here](http://alicestill.tumblr.com/post/180134319104/i-am-a-massive-fan-of-black-eyed-suzannah-qs). I just keep staring and staring, and finding new intricacies and easter eggs...this fandom is blessed.

“We should take high ground over the train. Are there good places on the ridge for shooting off our explosives? I haven’t gone into the hills much,” Rey’s asking her rag-tag group of saboteurs later that day, Dameron having ridden back to Sweet Springs. They’re gathered around a dirt-drawn sketch of the railway line that Finn’s marked out beside her porch. He wields a stick with an ease of practice that makes Ren suspect Rey and her fugitives of plotting to break him out of jail in this same way. The knowledge is both intriguing and horrifying.

But of course, the rough map doesn’t show topography.

“Poe might have ideas,” Leia says. She squints down at the sketch with hands braced on her thighs, hair braided over her shoulder and its ends damp from washing. “He must've scouted other homesteads further into the mountains after he visited your ranch, my dear.”

“Well, Dameron’s not around,” Ren retorts on instinct.

“Hmm, yes. He’ll need at least a day to smuggle out your Winchester and a rifle for me, then locate where the nitroglycerin is being stored,” his mother answers calmly against his pique. “It will take time, if he isn't to look suspicious while acquiring the goods and information to anyone watching—and someone is sure to be watching. If the overseers are half-competent, they already know about their missing bottle. A guard will be stationed. But if you’re impatient, sweetheart, there’s another alternative beyond waiting for Poe to return.”

“What is it?” Rey asks, before Ren can shut down that option with the scorn it deserves.

Because he knows where this is going— _nowhere good_ —just as surely as he knows Leia’s set him up for it. Stunned and furious at his mother’s audacity, he’s not quick enough to head her off when Leia answers,

“We consult with my brother, Luke. We ride up to his claim and ask his advice. He's lived high in these hills for years; if anyone knows a safe route and shooting locations, it will be him.”

Rey frowns at Finn’s sketch. She pulls her lower lip between her teeth, gnawing the chapped flesh. “Would he meet with strangers?”

“Or anyone. And the answer to that’s a flat _no_. Why are we even discussing this?” Skin over Ren's knuckles stretches tight and pale from where his fingers have curled into fists. “He’s a useless old man—”

“You had troubles with Luke, sweetheart. I know that. But it was years ago. And given our timeline, we need his help.”

“I—”

“You don’t have to come with us,” Rey says. Her voice is pitched soft, her tone all steel; Ren’s protest dies in his throat. “Stay here. Stay with Finn and Tico. You don’t have to come with me.”

“You’re going?”

“I won’t risk Little Bee or Millie by exploring dangerous terrain without a guide. Not on the ridge. I can't afford to. And if this man knows about trails and shooting hides, I need his information. So I have to go. But you can stay. Defend the ranch. Someone needs to.”

She’s offering him a retreat. A way out when he’s backed into a corner beneath too many inquiring eyes, too much wondering over his fists and fear. Almost an honorable way. And she’s trusting him to look after her land. Her precious land. That’s...that’s...but Rey can’t meet with Luke Skywalker. His lies, or a strangling silence that speaks more than any tirade—

“No. I’m coming with you.”

“Don’t be a fool,” she snaps. “They need you here.” What she doesn’t say is, _I need you here._ But Ren hears her unspoken words, feels their echo deep in his chest. Again Rey's offering him a way out, even while she’s sharp with impatience.

He shakes his head. He really is a fool. “When do we leave?”

“How long is the ride to his ranch from Sweet Springs?”

Leia tilts back her head to gauge sunshine streaming down across the valley, its radiance tinted with a summer afternoon’s deep gold. Ren watches her bask in it for a moment—the rosy glow after her years of confinement within a cell, released into the jail's yard only to witness executions. She says, “Several hours from the town. If we leave now—"

“We’d be descending the ridge after nightfall.”

“We’ll always be descending some ridge in the dark,” Rey retorts to his hedging. “Your mare—how is she on trails?”

 _A champion._ “Good enough.”

“Then saddle up. Mrs. Organa, you’ll ride out on Millie.”

“But my dear girl, who will be left to look after your ranch tonight, if you and your shotgun come with us?”

“I—” Rey bites her abused lip again. A dark, discolored bruise blooms within the flesh. She winces. Her eyes flitter sideways to linger on Finn and Tico. She chews with painful persistence while swift choices pass across her clear and lovely face, illusive as sunlight over fast-running water. Choices that worry her. But then she nods, resignation in her sigh. “I’ll stay. So long as...” Her glance darts next to Ren.

That same apprehension.

He burns beneath those hazel eyes with their flecks of jade and concern. Ren forces himself to shrug casually, working his uncooperative muscles in sections. “It’s been a long time.”

“I’ll be with him,” Leia says.

Rey gives a clipped jerk of her chin.

Ren scowls. Yet still, he burns.

While his mother exchanges her twice-patched gray dress for a pair of Rey’s trousers—more suitable than skirts for riding over rough country—Rey stomps off to the barn and begins tacking up Millie. Grooming brushes and hoof picks whirl as she strips dander from the mule’s coat, excavates her hooves, then slides a woven pad and saddle onto Millie’s withers. Ren keeps out of her way. He retrieves the brushes that Rey discards and works them over his mare. The chestnut whuffles into his palm. Bobbing her head against his chest, she itches her poll on his shoulder with fluttering lips.

“You’re treating her well?” Rey cinches up Millie’s girth, arms straining when the mule bloats. “Oh, don’t be this way…” Millie sighs and releases the air held in her lungs. Rey hitches her belly band several notches tighter; the saddle won’t slip off her withers, no matter how much Millie scrambles and slides while mounting the ridge.

Ren's chestnut snorts her own answer to Rey before he can, nickering into his pockets.

Rey’s taut shoulders soften fractionally. She fetches Millie’s bridle from its peg on the wall. “Good. And...your leg?”

“I’m not limping.”

“Mmm.” Rey raises her bridle, holding its crosspiece over Millie’s ears and coaxing a bit between the mule's teeth. She takes her time with it, letting Millie mouth the bit’s metal links before drawing the crown up over her absurd jackrabbit ears. Rey adjusts the cheek straps. "Pain?”

“No.” Ren buckles on his mare’s breast collar, preparing to cross steep terrain. “The morphine helped. And I didn’t have much opportunity to strain the bones in my cell. You set them fine.”

“I know.” Rey turns with one hand on her hip, the other holding Millie’s reins. “I’ve had practice.”

References to obscure facets of her past, thrown out like a challenge. Ren knows better than to press her. “I’m sorry for that, but thank you.”

She remains quite still, waiting for him to demand more. But Ren doesn’t. Not this time. He manages not to ask when curiosity flames in his chest—because he's learned his lesson, and he’s also got plenty to distract him. Like the fact that he’s about to voluntarily ride back to his uncle’s homestead. Take that path and those memories again.

Perhaps this shows too plainly on his face, even with his wild hair and beard. He’s hoped they'd make him inscrutable; he hasn’t shaved or cut back the snarled monstrosity since leaving jail. He needs its protection around her. But it’s not enough. Of course it isn’t. This is Rey.

“You don’t have to go,” she murmurs, dipping down her face to adjust Millie’s stirrups for Leia. Her mouth’s hidden shape offers him plausible deniability that he hasn’t heard her.

“I won’t ask you to leave your ranch unprotected at night, Rey. Not now. And not for me.” He speaks loudly where she’s been quiet, firm where she’s been soft. Owning his choice.

“I...thank you.”

Ren waits for her head to raise, for her gaze to lock with his. “You’re welcome.”

And Rey...Rey doesn’t say anything in either retort or reply. She holds his look. Caught in bars of sunlight, dust motes glimmer through the stable’s musty air. Swirling, swirling. Another breath and she’s still quiet, the edge of her tongue sliding between parted lips. An echo of flowing water and the scent of lanolin soap...a shadowed, silent moment.

Thrumming.

Ren finds himself taking one deliberate step forward, then another. Rey doesn't sidle away. They’re barely a foot apart when he halts, her head tilted up with her eyes still fastened to his. Hazel irises darkening as her pupils blossom. As her breath hitches, once. And he wonders what would happen if he reached out very, very slowly to curl his fingers around the shell of her ear, tucking back spiraling tendrils that have slipped loose from her bun…

“Ready?” Leia strides into the barn. Seams in her requisitioned trousers creak with her steps' force.

Breath catching on her lips, Rey leaps away. She collides awkwardly with Millie’s shoulder and grabs the saddlehorn for balance. Ren finds that he’s raised a hand, fingers extended, reaching for her. He actually has.

And she’s allowed it.

“Y-yes. Here’s Millie tacked up for you, Mrs. Organa. Safe travels, happy travails— _trails_. Goodbye.” Rey practically runs from the stable, her feet stumbling over its familiar threshold.

“Oh, Ben.” Leia gathers up the reins that Rey's left dangling. “What did you do?”

“That was all you, _mother_.”

And for once— _for goddamn once_ —Leia Organa appears at a loss for words. She doesn't retort; she just blinks. But then her narrowed eyes track between his falling hand and Rey’s shuffling boots. So Ren doesn’t wait for her to find her speech. Checking his saddlebags' straps one last time, he mounts up onto his mare. A clicking tongue sends the chestnut away from both the barn and his mother at a quick canter. The mare snorts, eager to stretch her legs after days spent sharing Millie’s stall.

“ _Ben!_ ”

He doesn’t rein back. After all—and much as he wishes he didn’t—Ren knows the path they’re taking: up the ridge, into the mountains to his uncle’s homestead. Rey’s shanty blurs past where she and the others are gathered on its porch. Perhaps he imagines it, but she might be lifting her hand in a token for godspeed. His mare surges down the hill behind the ranch, where he wheels her left through a poplar copse beside the river. They skirt the valley’s edge in shadow from its looming hills. No point in making a target of himself by riding true north, to where Luke Skywalker’s cabin clings between bouldered slopes high over Sweet Springs. He’ll skulk in the gloom for as long as he can.

His mother is clever enough to follow his example by aiming for the river and the afternoon’s only darkness. He’d expect nothing less. Easing his mare down to a strength-conserving jog—even the fastest trot expends less energy for a horse than a canter—Ren cocks his ears for a telltale thud behind him: Millie’s four-beat canter on what his body knows to be five legs, in direct contradiction of his eyes.

Yes, there it is.

“Dear lord,” Leia groans when Millie draws level with the chestnut. Her mouth’s corners dent her cheeks with an effort not to loose worse invectives at her recalcitrant mount. Ren knows the feeling all too well. “Tell me she’s not always like this.”

He scoffs his laughter; Leia’s discomfort does something to appease his frustration with her terribly timed entrance into the stable. Well, a bit. It’s only right that Millie should torment his mother as she’s tormented him. Especially after that inopportune appearance.

“She’s always like this.” He doesn’t bother to keep a supercilious note from his voice.

Leia grunts. “Then we'd best get on with it. Do you know the way, or shall I lead?”

“How could I forget?” He grimaces, any sour satisfaction abruptly snatched away. “I memorized every damn step of that path, just to avoid thinking about what was going to happen to me at the end of it.”

“He tried to be kind, sweetheart. Luke isn't always an easy man to understand—”

“No.” Ren’s laugh is short and harsh. Mirthless.

“Ben…”

“ _No_.” He clatters his heels along the chestnut's sides again. She blunders forward into a canter, to hell with conserving energy.

Leia’s sigh blows after him on the wind. Millie follows with a shambling, staggering stride. It’s a gait which constantly threatens to toss a rider over the mule's withers or her rump, depending on whether her forelegs or hindquarters are the pair clomping out of rhythm. Ren knows the aching discomfort of that stride quite well, and urges his mare on faster in retaliation. Faster still. They gallop across the valley without speaking. Only an occasional grumble from Leia breaks their quiet when Millie gives the appearance of having forgotten about one of her legs.

Ren smirks.

It’s an ugly expression. He doesn’t much care.

One mile melts away. Then another. Their mounts step gingerly over the railroad’s ugly scars and ties, far from work gangs to the west as they ride along the valley’s northeastern quadrant. Ren grits his teeth at a harsh, metallic odor burning his nostrils. He urges his mare on.

Up ahead, a switchback trail—little more than a path for deer descending from the hills to drink at lowland rivers—winds high in a cleft between two mounded foothills. Ren and Leia canter toward its foot as shadows stretch long around objects that had none at noon. A treacherous route, the trail zigzags deep into canyons and clings along knife-edged precipices. Only a man seeking perfect solitude would build his shanty at the end of a path like this.

Only a boy from Sweet Springs that no one could control would be sent up it.

A last resort.

“No need to take it all at once,” Ren mutters. The mare tosses her head in agreement.

“Be careful!” his mother calls when he nudges his chestnut onto the switchback’s first jaunt. As though he hasn’t done this before. As though he hasn’t braved a hundred worse things without flinching. Or without flinching much—because although Kylo Ren doesn’t flinch, he’s also made from blood and bone. Infuriatingly breakable.

_Leg, heart._

“Don’t wait on them,” he tells his mare. He urges her onto the next switchback, edging up out of the foothills’ shadows. The chestnut's ears glow with sunlight beaming through them. “We’ll be fine. Millie’ll be fine.”

The mare's silent laboring is retort enough.

“Millie will look after her. Happy?”

She snorts and pitches upward, saddle pulling against her breast collar. Pebbles rattle below as Millie begins her ascent. Leather creaks. Leia grunts. Ren glances back over his shoulder, but no hillside slabs have given way; both Leia and the mule are doggedly following his chestnut up their path, switchback by tortuous switchback. Leia’s mouth is grim. Millie’s nostrils flare _._

Step by step.

They climb a first set of zigzags. A second. They mount the slope for minutes and then an hour without speaking, seeming to advance only by inches in their single-file ascent. They keep barely ahead of dusky shadows dousing the valley's slopes, blurring them with uncertain shapes where once rocks stood out in jagged formations or a conifer speared the sky. The land changes as they rise, soft soil giving way to a crunch of stone beneath the animals’ hooves. One step and another, switchback upon switchback, trees clinging to rock faces with roots spread out for purchase on the unforgiving, half-vertical terrain. Pines with their sharp, tangy scent and amber sap replace the lowlands’ gnarled oaks. What little loam remains on the hillsides is sandy and easily displaced, blown across the ridges on fickle wind.

Ren’s thighs and stomach ache with steadying himself forward over his mare’s withers, keeping his balance and hers. But he welcomes the brutal concentration that this path demands, just as when he'd been a boy sent along it and meant not to return. There’s no room in his head for anything but directing his mare’s next stride, for measuring his counterweight when she stumbles. He trusts Millie to look after his mother. He doesn’t glance again over his shoulder to witness either Leia's fear or anticipation—seeing her brother after all these years.

The same Luke Skywalker to whom she so foolishly entrusted her son.

Ren’s mare bobs her head to recall his vacillating attention. Stamping a foreleg, she hesitates at a fork in their path; they've crested the ridge at last. One trail leads off toward a level stretch of ground, widening almost into a plateau that overlooks Sweet Springs' eastern quadrant. The other twists higher into the hills.

Groaning for his chafed thighs, Ren lays his reins along the left side of the mare’s neck. She turns right with a little groan of her own, then takes to the tortuous, rising path. Sweat paints damp patches over her shoulders and soaks through Ren’s shirt. The sun glares down on their laboring figures, reflected brutally off barren rock. Thin pine shadows offer only an illusive scrim of cool when they pass between the rough, straight trunks growing close to their trail on a few inches of arable soil. Shivering through his perspiration, Ren remembers this—a fear that there will be nothing left of the world when he finally arrives at his uncle’s claim, that every step he ascends strips away something else from the earth: grass, water, soil, trees, until even the rocks disappear beneath him and he falls, falls—

But he knows this path. He knows how it ends.

“Nearly there, sweetheart,” Leia pants behind him. She’d called him _sweetheart_ then, too.

Ren claps his heels against his chestnut’s sodden sides. She picks up a weary trot, carrying them along the last few feet of shale and sand. They crest another peak within the valley's greater ridge, then drop down into a little hollow that boasts a stretch of nearly flat ground. Nestled between two mounded boulders, its far edge slanting off into a steep cliff, Luke Skywalker’s claim overlooks the entire Sweet Springs valley. It’s a place to defend against the world, if a man has a rifle.

One way in, one way out. And there’s no way to approach it quietly.

But no gun-toting figure emerges in either welcome or challenge from a knock-kneed cabin built into the crevasse. The shanty’s shingles are wind-scoured. Grease-paper's been torn from its windows. The door swings idly in breezes stirring across the hills as sunset descends to darken the pastures below. A winch overhanging the cliff with a rope-hung bucket has splintered at its handle. The tar-smeared cordage is frayed. How many times Ren cranked that winch to haul up a bath...to water his uncle’s burro...even to drink. Hating the burn in his shoulders, furious at the hardship that Luke subjected him to, living up here with only the lonely, soughing air and his donkey for company.

But it’s abandoned. His uncle’s claim is abandoned.

“Luke?” Leia dismounts with a squeal from her saddle that’s overloud, screeching down across the lowlands from where they stand so high above them, above Sweet Springs, above the whole valley, above the very world. “Luke, are you inside?”

“He’s not here.”

A striking rattlesnake spitting poison into his veins...or the donkey stepping on his foot, splintering bones so that he can’t drag himself to the winch, can’t drag up water to drink, can’t ride for help…

“He’s gone,” Ren says when Leia drops Millie’s reins and strides toward the shanty.

“Or he’s dead.” She pauses only for a moment on the cabin’s threshold. Then she draws back the creaking, swinging door and steps inside.

One breath of silence, then another.

He waits for a scream, for an indrawn breath, for a sorrowing sigh...but his mother remains quiet within the shanty. He’s reluctant to dismount, to set foot on this cursed patch of soil again. He really doesn't want to. Yet curiosity puckers his shoulders when Leia still continues silent. Only a faint rustle of footsteps over floorboards echoes out to the ledge. Then—

“Ben.” Abrupt and precise, his name cracks across the hushed crevasse.

“What?” he grunts, as though refusing her summons. But Ren's already swinging off his mare.

“He’s not here.” Leia appears at the shanty door to repeat back his words. “But come. There is something you should see.”

“I don’t need to see anything he’s—”

“You do. You need to see this. Come.”

He’d sworn he’d never walk back into this place. The room with its narrow cot, a single chair, one cupboard for stores. Little else; Luke Skywalker had preferred cooking over an outdoor fire, even on rainy, wind-torn, or freezing days. He’d preferred to eat out in the elements, too. Ren had caught fever after fever from the brutal exposure, while his uncle remained untouched by either driving hail or the sun's burn.

“There’s nothing to hurt you,” his mother says with infuriating gentleness. “Nothing to fear.”

He’s not fucking _afraid_! He’s angry—that’s what he is. Angry with Luke, angry with Leia Organa, angry even with Rey for forcing him to come out here.

...Except that she hadn’t. She’d offered him a way out. Which he’d refused on principle and pride, and...something else.

No, he’s not angry with Rey.

He’s angry with himself.

Yes, _angry_.

Steeling his shoulders against a shudder, almost daring himself to do it, Ren ducks through the cabin door. It’s lower than he remembers; the crown of his head scrapes its lintel. Always some injury from his uncle, some neglected warning.

Or he’s grown taller.

Luke Skywalker had been a looming, unspeaking presence through the entire year that Ren spent trapped in this cabin, in this hollow, on this ridge.

But had he been short, too? Even past the doorway, Ren continues to brush his head against the shanty’s beams. He can only stand upright in parts of the room—though this might be due to the cabin’s inevitable collapse from rot, worms, and weather. The boards beneath his boots are soft with decay. Shredded oilcloth over the shack's damaged windows brighten the cabin’s decrepit, dusty insides more than Ren can ever remember from his time here; Luke was never much interested in being inside. He’d built the shanty to fulfill his claim’s statutes, to do no more than keep away the worst storms when even he couldn’t brave the elements. Nothing about this room was anything more than barely functional when Luke lived here. It’s not even that, now.

It’s nothing. And there’s nothing.

Ren scowls at his mother’s lure. “So? What was it? There isn't anything—”

Leia's exasperated sigh itches his neck. “You see only what you expect to see. But _look_.” She gestures to the store cupboard, its open doors hanging drunkenly from their hinges.

A few tins of beans on the shelves twist Ren’s gut—he remembers these beans; they’re the same as Rey’s, the same he’d been forced to swallow down when his uncle wouldn’t hunt, wouldn’t even skin a squirrel. They'd subsisted instead on wild plants grubbed up from the soil and on produce from a tiny patch of garden. Then on beans, when hoarfrost hardened the earth in winter. There’s a stack of milk cans in the cupboard, too, labels peeling off their sides. Nothing else, except…

Tucked behind the tins to weight it from blowing away: a grubby fold of paper.

Inscribed on it: _Ben._

“Take it,” Leia says, when Ren stands before the cupboard with hands hanging dumbly at his sides. He hadn't been certain whether his uncle was even literate...thought it was part of his punishment: being sent to live with a man who’d never so much as cracked a smile, much less a book.

“What is it?”

His mother merely repeats, “Take it.” And she waits.

 _Ben._ A letter. Well, he won’t read anything that his uncle's written. After so much silence? When Luke couldn't be bothered to actually tell Ren whatever it is he wanted to say? No. He doesn’t want justifications. He doesn’t want anything from Luke Skywalker. He's not so weak. He won’t read the note.

But still, Leia waits. Watching him with her disappointment tingling against his skin, raising hair on his nape.

She can wait the whole day, for all Ren cares. Or all night; it’s too late to begin their descent back into the valley. Too dangerous to take that switchback trail in the dark. Perhaps she’s planned their excursion this way, forcing him to stay the night in Luke’s shanty. Forcing a happy family reunion. Well, she’s failed in this. A grim glow of satisfaction wakes in his chest.

“I’m going to water the animals.”

Leia shakes her head at his perverseness. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

Ren slams Luke's cabin door, striding over to the cliff face and grabbing the winch’s handle. His hands remember it. His shoulders recall its twist and pull, the weightless lowering of a bucket down to a spring in the valley's floor, then the dredging ache of hauling it up again. Fortunately, the splintered tool doesn’t crack further. The rope’s tarred length holds. He dumps his brimming bucket into a rough-hewn trough for the chestnut and Millie. He fills their nosebags with oats that Rey packed into his saddlebags for the journey; she’d known he wasn’t coming back to the ranch tonight. He both hates and blesses her foresight. Ren untacks the animals and rubs them down. Then he stretches out his legs, leans against the trough, and pries open a tin of Rey’s beans—he wouldn't touch his uncle’s supply with a ten-foot pole. He ignores Leia shuffling through the cabin, touching this and that, sighing and smiling by turns.

“Would you look at this place! He never was one for creature comforts, but he’s let the place go in these past years,” she mutters, her voice carrying through unchinked boards. Pretending that Luke's claim doesn’t stink with the sour odor of abandonment. That he might be back at any moment with his donkey in tow, hauling firewood or a pack stuffed full of roots and nuts from the pine copse.

But Luke Skywalker isn’t coming back. Ren says as much when his mother’s mumbles and eyes rolling at the dust take on a theatrical quality.

Leia walks back out onto the ledge, hands on her hips while she scans the valley. “I know that, sweetheart. I’ve known it for a long time. Known that he’s gone.”

“Then why come here?” Ren jabs a knife into his bean tin.

“This is a good vantage point for scouting the railroad.” She points to a dim flicker of firelight in the distance, a spark just visible from some camp or smelting fire along the valley’s northern edge. The lowlands' slopes flatten there; there’d be no way to sneak up for reconnaissance. “So I came for this view, and because we need to talk. Not in the jail. Not on Rey’s ranch. Just the two of us.”

“What’s there to say? You sent me here, even before any of that shit with the posters.”

“I was wrong. I see that now. But I was trying to help. And Luke was, too. In his way.”

“He left me!” Ren chucks aside his abused tin. “He left me here for days and days by myself, while he was off doing god knows what, god knows where! You wanted to get me away from all those people in Sweet Springs? Watching me, whispering? You did a fine job. You got me away from _everyone_.”

“He was trying to teach you to be self-sufficient. So that you wouldn't need others to be who you are: the mayor's son, or the boy who...you could simply be Ben. So that you could withstand any opinions, or whispers. He was teaching you to be your own man, Ben!”

Ren can’t stop himself from rising to her bait, rage rising likewise from his stomach's pit. “Really? I was _fifteen_! That’s hardly older than Rey was when you took her under your wing. You sheltered her when everyone either pitied or despised her. When she hated the world. So what made me different? What made you need to exile me when you loved her?”

But Leia is quiet. For one moment, then another. As though something in Ren’s charge has broken a thread holding her to her purpose, she slumps. Instead of shouting back at him, she looks away. Fading sunlight picks out deep lines in her cheeks. Gouges.

“Loved her? Yes, I did. I do. As I did and do love you, Ben. Know that. But Rey…what was hurting her...it was beyond her. An external wound. What had been done to her—you and I can hardly imagine it. Yet it was something she could eventually escape. Build a new life for herself from its ashes. Perhaps she has. But you...what was hurting you was inside.

“I know you never meant to kill your father. I tried to show you that. And to show you how to be strong in the face of grief. I wanted you to forgive yourself. But you couldn’t. All those people in town, seeing the guilt tearing you apart even though it was an accident, they wondered and whispered...I thought it would be easier if you could leave that behind. If you could be alone for a while without needing to explain anything. And I knew my brother wouldn’t ask too many questions.”

“He didn’t ask any. Not a damn thing! He just looked at me, and left me, and he—”

“I was wrong to send you away. But I did what I thought was best at the time. I have to live with those consequences. With you hurting and becoming...the man you choose to be. As does Luke.”

“He doesn’t,” Ren grits out, hard and cruel and aching. “He’s gone. When you need him, he’s always gone.”

“No one’s ever really gone, sweetheart.” Leia leans down and takes his hand. Before he can jerk back or strike out, his mother curls his fingers around the letter bearing his name. She says, “For when you’re ready.”

Then she leaves him, retreating back into the shanty with her saddlebags. She settles onto Luke’s cot, her bones and the rotted bedstead groaning.

Ren sits unmoving. Fingers clenched so that spidery tears rend the paper in his grip, focused on anything except Luke's letter, he stares straight out over the valley, at sparks from the railway fires beneath their billowing clouds of gray and purple smoke. He traces ridges above the railroad's camp inch by inch. His eyes work along a terrifying route over sheer drops and spiked peaks, winding and tortuous, nauseating...but that eventually leads back to his uncle’s claim. Somehow, impossibly, it does. It’s an unbroken and mad trail, yes—but someone clever and desperate could use it to circumnavigate the northern valley by its ridgeline alone. His lofty vantage and the setting sun illuminate a promontory and a crevasse, the deepening light picking out details with exquisite clarity: scrub brush for cover, hard rock for sheltering if guards on the tracks below return fire.

Details he never could’ve seen from Rey’s southern ranch.

So this trek's not _completely_ pointless.

Ren hates that his mother was right about this. Wrong about everything else—but owning it. And it’s not fair that she can apologize. That she can forgive him and expect his forgiveness in return. It’s not fair, because he wants to hate her as he swears he does. But when he probes for a searing, seething rage in his belly, rage that's sustained him for more than a decade in doing what he's had to do to—to be Kylo Ren—he's...he’s just tired.

He’s exhausted. He’s been fighting and burning for so long. He’s held onto his anger against a mother he hardly recognizes now as the steel-eyed woman who once sent him away from his home, sent him into a mute, terrible exile. Anger against a man who’s most likely dead.

Paper crinkles in his fingers as Ren's fist contracts.

Luke Skywalker failed Ben Solo. His meditation, his plants, his hours and hours of silence when all Ben wanted was to spill out the truth, to be told that he was forgiven. A year of unreadable quiet from the man whose best friend he’d killed. He’d been a boy, desperate to be soothed, to be left alone and held tight. Everything contradictory all at once.

Everything he wants to do for Rey.

 _Rey_.

What would she do with a paper like this? A letter from a dead man. Would she shred it apart and hurl it from her? Would she release her fingers, watch it flutter over the edges of the world, a scrap gilded by sinking sunlight until it's lost in the darkness? Or would she unfold it with delicate care for the paper’s age? And...

_Ben,_

_I hope you will read this someday. If not, then not. I must make my peace with either. But if you do return to this cabin and find this letter, whether it be tomorrow or in fifty years, then I must begin by saying that I know I have failed you. Let me tell you how I have failed you._

_To begin: an hour before I write these words, you returned down the mountain. To the valley. Why? I ask myself. There was no argument between us. Only a silence that I was too weak to break. I feared to say the wrong thing and so I said nothing, which was worse. For that, I am sorry._

_How did it come to this? There was no one moment. But the silence grew between us day by day. For a year. A year of silences. I saw your rage and your loneliness. I wanted to say something of grief or forgiveness or comfort, but I had lost the habit of speech. I wanted...but I failed. I grieved for Han, when I should have grieved also for you. I had lost a friend_ — _I, who have loved so little that is human in pursuit of what I shall only call_ spirit— _but you had lost a father. And so, silence. By the time I might have broken it, there was too much unsaid to ever begin. I do not excuse myself for what I did, or did not do. I simply state the facts of my failure. I was a coward. That is another fact._

_Without you, my accustomed silence is now oppressive. Your slam of the shanty door has faded, and the quiet weighs heavily upon me, where before there was peace and purpose. I cannot remain where we have been silent together. That silence will crush me as surely as mine has crushed you. I did not understand the damage of an angry silence, before. I am sorry, Ben._

_There are a people whose language I do not speak, a people of forests and hills, a people driven from the valley and into a life akin to the one I have taken freely. A people I have met upon a time, and passed without speaking as we went our ways. My silence will not harm them. For I see now that my solitude is selfish. I must end it. There can be no spirit in isolation. A spirit must be shared to know itself. I will offer my silence and my service to these people, a people we have wronged by claiming what was never ours to claim. What cannot be claimed: the land itself. It belongs only to the wind and sky._

_Perhaps this will be almost enough._

_Atonement, Ben. We must all atone in our ways._

_None of these actions of mine will ease your way. I know this. And it is cowardly and selfish of me to hope that this letter will come to your hands one day. To hope that it will offer you what I could not: understanding. But I hope._

_Goodbye, Ben._

No signature. He doesn’t recognize the faded scrawls of looped writing. More words on this paper than they’d ever spoken together in their silent year. But he senses his uncle in the lines and ink dried brown with age. _Spirit_.

 _Peace and purpose_ , Luke has written.

He feels neither in a silence settling with nightfall over the hollow and its cliff. But nor does he feel a white-hot burn of rage. What he feels...he feels his bone-deep exhaustion, and he feels understanding _._ His uncle’s, his own. It’s not forgiveness; it’s resignation. Luke Skywalker, Kylo Ren. Only men, at the end. _Fallible, regretful_. And perhaps that’s the most he can hope for.

Resignation and atonement.

Luke Skywalker’s atonement for Ben Solo.

And Ben Solo’s atonement for Kylo Ren?

He feels that, too.

Still...

“ _Spirit_. Ha!” he mutters.

The chestnut pricks her ears over the water trough. Her nostrils flutter around a little wickering noise.

“What?”

She snorts.

“You believe in that? You believe him?”

Her foreleg stamps while he retrieves his bedroll from the saddlebags and spreads it over a tolerable patch of ground in daylight’s last indigo glimmers. The mare's muzzle swings around. She snatches up his hat while he’s bent down to check his blankets for unsavory bedfellows.

“Give that back!” He grabs for his Stetson, cringing at the glistening trails of spittle she leaves on its brim. One eye rolling, the mare doesn’t release his hat. Again she stamps a foreleg. An exclamation point, ordering him to understand. He frowns at her, then scoffs. “Oh. _Spirit_. That’s you, is it?”

She thunks the hat into the exact center of his chest.

“ _Spirit_?” He groans. What absurd poetry. As if this day weren’t already strange enough.

She nickers.

“Fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My darling Spirit now has a name! <3 (Why do I get so attached to the animals in this fic?)
> 
> (Per usual, I've fallen behind on answering your lovely, lovely comments...NaNoWriMo is smacking me upside the head every darn day. But soooooon!)
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	18. Chapter 18

Leia and Ren haven’t returned from their ridgeline scouting by the time a ripe summer moon crests the valley’s zenith. Rey forces herself off the porch and to her prickly mattress. Tendons in her hips and knees have stiffened with stillness, but her feet are sore from pacing, pacing, pacing—before she’d settled down to wait and watch. Any sleep she manages is sticky with sweat and worry. No matter how she tosses and pummels, she can’t find a comfortable position to ease her aches. She wakes at first light, irritable and unrefreshed— _they’re still not back_ —and works through her chores without rousing Finn or Rose, both of whom snore and sleep like logs. Then Rey fetches her lanolin soap and sackcloth towel, a pair of trousers she’s only worn twice, and a shirtwaist whose underarms are still fresh enough.

There’s an itch in her skin that no scratching nails can sate. And it's time for her monthly bath.

Once she’s tugged loose her boots and shucked off her clothes, Rey wades out into the river. Gooseflesh puckers her shoulders and nape. Though the air’s warm with a heavy summer stillness, poplar shade dapples the water and currents whisper with chilly fingers at her dirty, knobby ankles. Shuddering, she bends to soak her burlap. She lathers it with soap and begins to scrub viciously at lifted hairs on her arms. The cloth chafes her hands, her breasts, her cheeks, and the crevices behind her ears. It strips off any lingering paint or sensations of satin. But there’s no relief. Her muscled stomach and the narrow curves of her hips redden with frustrated scouring. Then her thighs and knees. Running sudsy fingers along her scalp only snares her nails in a tangled mess.

_Damn it, damn it!_

A hard wrench looses Rey from her own hair and unbalances her feet on weed-slicked river stones. “Ah!” she throws up her hands in defeat, reeling. She stumbles back toward the bank where she’s left her clothes and a comb, and—

Kylo Ren is striding down the hill from the shanty to her creek.

_Oh, sweet lord._

Rey only has time to duck behind the river’s curved bank, submerging her shoulders and edging behind a stand of poplars growing so close to the water that their roots tickle the currents—before he’s here. He kneels— _collapses_ —and splashes his face. He groans into his hands. She doesn’t snap her eyes away quickly enough when Ren rips his shirt over his head, not bothering with its buttons, and douses his arms and shoulders. Sunlight falling through the poplars’ branches stripes his back, individuating each coil of muscle, each ragged scar. And his ears. Rey’s never seen his ears before. He slicks down ragged, cowlicked strands of hair with rough hands while scrubbing knuckles against his bearded cheeks, and his ears...are gigantic.

Rey’s grateful that she’s sunk down to her knees with water lapping over her mouth; her pitchy giggle erupts only as a stream of bubbles. She couldn’t look away now for anything.

Those ears, they’re like jughandles. And she wants to touch them. Wants to wander her fingers through every sunburned, shell-like curve. To pinch the lobes so that he hisses. To grip them while his mouth—

Ren’s head swings around, eyes squinting against the river's sunlit glare speckling his face. Sweet lord, she’s made some noise audible even beneath the rippling water.

“Who’s—is that— _Rey_?” His palms drop to brace against his thighs. He stands. One hand reaches reflexively for an empty holster at his belt. His crooking fingers clench on nothing.

Another burbling sound escapes her.

_Damn, damn, damn._

“Umm...yes, I’m…” she stammers. What excuse can she make if he stalks around the bank? If he sees that she’s hidden behind the poplars’ trunks rather than answer him? Rey's pride won’t allow it. “But I’m...bathing. So...so close your eyes and hand me my clothes. Please.”

“You _are_ here, then.” To Ren’s credit, he merely raises his eyebrows at her voice breaking from under the poplars’ overhanging roots. He picks up her discarded shirt and walks to the bank's furthest point into the river before rounding its pitch—and stops.

Rey folds herself lower in the water, one arm clutched across her chest, fingers spread over the dark curls of her sex. Sighing, Ren raises a hand before his eyes in a parody of modesty.

“What are _you_ doing here?” she challenges him, as though she’s in any position to demand answers.

“Washing. I thought that’d be obvious. I stink like decay from Luke's cabin.” He extends Rey’s shirt to her, face averted. She lunges for it, fingertips fluttering against the fabric.

She misses.

In the instant that her nails scrabble on the shirtwaist, Ren releases the cloth. He opens his eyes.

Neither of them move.

For a stunned moment, they both stare at the damp, transparent fabric swirling and sinking in the water between them. One heartbeat, and another. Rey tries to hitch up her shocked jaw. To loose a string of invectives at him. At least to reach for her shirt. She can’t. She’s utterly bare and he...Ren’s gaze lifts from the sodden shirtwaist to where she stands naked without a single scrap to cover herself. Water curls in little frothing waves around her waist. Her nipples have already pebbled with cold, but now every inch of her body tightens under his look. A shivery silver light filters through the poplar leaves; it burnishes his irises with an argent, ardent gleam.

Rey gulps hard. What else can she do? Her knees are locked but trembling. If she stirs, she’ll fall. Besides, it’s only skin. Skin that she’s patched over and sewn back together, burned with sun exposure and her initial clumsiness using a cattle brand. Nothing that she hasn’t seen a thousand times before. But now that _he_ sees her...she’s a stranger within her own body. She feels...she _feels._ Each sensation—water stroking against the backs of her thighs, sunlight dappling her shoulders and warming the crown of her head, a blush staining her cheeks, creeping down her throat over her small, dusky breasts...Everything is new. Fresh. Unexpected. As though she experiences these sensations for the first time. She sees herself for one resonant moment as he sees her.

Not as he’d seen the dress, but as he sees _her._

And then she’s ashamed—wishes she weren’t burned with the sun, snarls in her hair.

“Rey...you…”

Each scar is a vivid, ugly slash, whether pale and thin as the curves on her wrists from tangling in barbed wire, or grisly and trophic—a gash atop of her thigh where her knife had slipped in skinning coveys, parting her flesh almost to the bone. She’d sewn herself up with a needle dipped in whiskey and a hot slug of alcohol in her stomach to dull the pain...A patch of sunburn peels across her chest where she’d exposed her breasts in the satin basque. And her hair, wet at the nape, dripping its tangles down her spine— _ugh_.

Faltering at the skittering sensation, Rey braces an arm more tightly across her breasts and snakes out her other hand for the drowning shirt. “Sorry, sorry, I’m—” She grabs it to cover her nakedness and obscene scars. She futilely tries to smooth back snarls at her temples. Her hands shake and fail her.

“My god, you’re beautiful.” His whisper is softer than flowing water, than gilding sunlight. And the words aren't blasphemy on his tongue.

“You…” Rey struggles to inhale, to remember how to fill her chest while he’s staring at her with those hooded, lambent eyes. “You’re…”

“Back. I’ve come back.” Pebbles rattle as he shucks off his boots behind the mossy strand. He steps into the river. Currents flutter around his calves, soaking his trousers. He doesn’t shiver at the cold. One step and then another, edging around the poplar bank while she stands. While she waits. “And I...Rey?”

What is he asking? She doesn’t know. She’s always hated not knowing—but suddenly, she doesn’t care. It's enough that he is.

“Yes.”

They’re standing directly before each other now, only the transparent shirtwaist between them.

 _Tell me what you want._ Perhaps they’re both asking.

With a breath that shudders in his chest and also in hers, Ren raises a dripping hand from where his fingertips have trailed through the water. He doesn’t reach for her hips, her sex, or even the peaks of her breasts. Instead, he ghosts over the crown of her head, to her snarled nape.

“Please,” he says.

Rey’s eyelids flutter. She’s dizzy and light, burning beneath the water. She nods.

Ren’s palm slides down to cup the divot between her shoulders and neck. The pressure of his grip coaxes her to lean against his hand. Rey holds his gaze while she falls ever so gently back, slipping low into the river with his palm bracing her, holding her afloat. Ren wades through the currents until he’s upstream from where she's spread herself in the water, the curves of her breasts and her hipbones’ jut barely breaking the surface. He sinks down beside her.

“Hold on, Rey,” he murmurs.

Her hands find anchoring river stones. Ren releases her to hover through the rippling water, weightless. Then his fingers stroke her temples, tempting taut tendons in her throat to release, inviting her to submerge her scalp, to close her eyes while fickle sunlight skitters down through the poplar leaves and brushes over her cheeks. Rey sighs. She tilts her head into his cradling hands.

“I want to help.” His fingers probe through snarls at her nape, through knots pulled tight behind her ears. “Will you let me?”

Again, she tells him, “Yes.”

“Thank you.” A whisper, light as gossipy breezes muttering a commentary above the river.

 _You’re welcome._ Her mouth parts for the words, but another sigh escapes her instead. Yet she swears she feels Ren smile at her intent. Warmth blooms in her stomach. And across her lips.

Unlike when Rey struggles to brush her hair at the washbasin—dragging a comb's teeth over her temples and crown until they catch on snarls, so that it’s easier to jerk the brush loose, then bundle the mess under a rancher’s hat instead of dealing with it—Ren begins with his fingers working low on her nape. The strands there are matted into an impenetrable thicket when dry, stretching Rey's skin painfully. But they loosen under the water by a fraction, just enough that Ren begins to part hair from hair, one at a time.

“All right?”

“Yes.”

It hurts, of course. He labors over a section no more than an inch wide for what seems like hours. Matted clumps pull free and floats away. She hisses and clenches her teeth, but nods before he can ask her—

_Yes, don’t stop._

He doesn’t. Strand by strand, his patience is both excruciating and exquisite. He doesn’t touch her anywhere but on her skull, yet she feels his fingers traversing the hollows and peaks of her body, too. His fingers, yes, and the water—warm with sunlight. He combs through her hair until whole lengths drift in lazy smoothness. Snarls behind her ears unravel under his persistence gentleness—a word she hardly knows how to fit into her understanding of this man.

But something has changed in him. After visiting his uncle’s cabin, there's a...difference in Kylo Ren. A mellowing, a dimming of the blistering rage he's only ever just contained beneath his skin. She doesn’t know why, or how. But it’s good. _Yes. Good._  So Rey doesn’t think or wonder further. She floats.

He holds her, working at tangles binding her hair and her heart.

And she softens into his softness.

An hour. More. Summer air heats above the river, yet they’re shaded and cool within its currents. Wind gusting across the valley will knot Rey’s hair when she rides with her cattle, while she mends her fences. Her comb will snag on snarls...but she’ll lower herself again into the water, and be free.

She lapses in and out of time. She loses count of her breaths. She can’t even say when her hair finally floats loose around her in a dark, soft halo on the river's furrowed surface. When Ren begins to stroke from her temples to her throat, his touch tender and his skin rough with calluses. No longer working through her tangles, but caressing. Murmuring her name, a hum in his throat.

“Kylo,” she whispers.

“Ben,” he answers her.

_Ben._

Not Ren. Not Kylo. Not even Matthew. _Ben_. Perhaps she should be angry to find yet another name for this man. But she isn’t. She’s naked before him, and he’s combed her hair in the water with his fingers and endless patience. Softly.

“Ben.”

Rey releases her hold on the river's submerged stones. Her toes skim its sandy, pebbled bottom as she anchors herself again on her feet. She stands, hair falling over her shoulders and breasts, each strand molded to the contours of her body. She breathes. And then she raises one hand and presses a dripping print of her palm to Ben’s bare chest. Upon his own scars.

His breath hitches beneath her touch, eyes widening, lips parted. “Rey…”

Rey doesn’t remove her hand. The pulse in her wrist thunders against his heartbeat. She looks up into his face, catching and holding his gaze. _His eyes on hers where he’d fallen at her feet by the porch, when he’d thanked her for the dress_ ; what she’d felt then. And now.

“Will you let me?”

“Yes.”

Rey snakes her other arm around his neck. Her fingers brush the curve of his ear as she’s longed to do. Again, his breath shudders. She hesitates— _asking_ —then closes the distance between them so that her beaded nipples skim his wound-seamed chest. And Ben’s arms come around her, closing like a thunderclap and yet impossibly gentle, his enormous hands spanning her waist. Should she feel trapped? She doesn’t. He’s tender with her, whoever he is now.

Rey doesn’t know what to do with such gentleness...but to offer her own in return. She tilts up her chin. Her lips find his with the lightest touch.

And linger.

Their mouths are cold from the river water. The seams of their lips are warm. Ben’s fingers stroke her ribs, the curves of her hips. She yields.

They’re eager but tentative, lips shallow while they slant together. Learning without hurry, as though walking an unfamiliar room at night for the first time, no oil lamp or moonbeams to guide the way. A little wary. Curious. Not yet confident, but also not afraid.

Rey has never feared the dark. It’s what lurks within it that terrifies her, not the unfamiliarity itself. She doesn’t want to be careful anymore. Embracing what Ben offers, she closes her eyes and opens her mouth to him.

His pulse lurches under her palm, a single massive thud. And then he grips her with sudden ferocity—Kylo Ren's ferocity. He grinds his lips over hers, tongue stroking through her mouth, teeth snapping against her own. Rey likes it. She likes this from him, too. This wildness. This fire. She whimpers and angles her head, pressing closer so that their hips slot together. Heat at the apex of her sex finds friction against his trousers—

“Rey, are you down at the river? Dameron’s arrived!” Finn’s voice echoes down the hill. “He got a rifle for Mrs. Organa and Ren’s Winchester, but Ren’s not back.”

Rey and Ben spring apart, their damp skins clinging until the last possible moment—before ripping away with a hitch of discomfort. Rey's hand flies to her mouth, the flesh tender against her palm. Ben’s lips are swollen. Blood blossoms in their rich curves.

“Rey?”

_Oh sweet lord, what have I done?_

“I’m just finished!” she hollers back to Finn through her fingers. Perhaps he'll will chalk up the tremor in her voice to distance, or shivering from overlong immersion in the river.

_What have I done._

Whatever it is, she doesn’t regret it. Still, Rey avoids Ben’s eyes while wringing out her sopping hair. She drags her trousers, shirtwaist, and boots on over wet skin. If she looks...she passes her tongue across her bruised lips. Ben’s breath stutters.

“Rey.”

“Follow after me. Not too closely.” Tying back her hair, she strides along the river bank and toward her shanty, boots squeaking around her clammy feet. She doesn’t glance back to see him follow.

“Ren’s having a wash after the trail,” she tells her fugitives and Dameron when she rounds the shanty’s corner to find them waiting for her on the porch, the gunslinger’s horse tied at a post and his saddlebags lumped with Sweet Springs' spoils. “I met him going down as I was coming back. He’ll be along in a minute.”

“Mmm,” Leia hums; Rey blesses the other woman for not challenging her timeline. “There was quite a lot of dust at Luke's claim, true. It seems that my brother hasn’t been on his land for several years; the cabin was in disrepair and not very clean. I’d like a wash, myself. But for all that, it was still a useful excursion. I noted several likely places for shooting down off the ridge above the tracks. As I’m sure you did, sweetheart,” she adds.

Rey doesn’t need to turn to sense Ben striding up behind her. A tingle brushes her nape and shoulders where his fingers have stroked her skin.

Besides, his boots also squeak.

“There’s cover for shooters that’ll make it difficult for anyone to aim return fire. Brush and rock,” he says with admirable calm, as though he’s always been part of their discussion—not kissing Rey senseless in the river only ten minutes before.

She forces herself to swallow while he speaks. His voice rasps through empty hollows in her body and her knees quake, but she can’t...not yet. Rey holds herself to a wide-legged stance, bracing her joints since there’s no water to hold her upright. Rolling her lips to relieve their oversensitive prickle only inflames the flesh. A low, hot coil spools in her belly, sparking along her nether nerves. Her trousers’ crotch warms and dampens. Rey gulps again, as though trying to choke down a pinecone.

“And a good vantage?” she asks, voice too loud in her ears. Finn frowns at her from where he’s seated beside Rose on the porch; too loud for others, as well.

But Ben says, “Very good”—and suddenly Rey doesn’t care how Finn looks at her. Or Dameron, pushing back his hat’s brim with interest, mouth quirked and eyebrows winged high on his forehead. Or Rose, who tilts a smile into her lap with hands clasped against a giggle, the edge of her knowing glance tickling Rey’s cheek.

Leia Organa smiles outright—a blister and a balm—then changes the subject. “Well, what have you brought me, Poe?”

Dameron’s been busy in Sweet Springs and along the rail line, as he tells them while withdrawing an elegant lever-action rifle from his saddle’s holster. He presents it to Leia with a bow and a flourish, along with a rattling cardboard box of cartridges. He tosses Ben’s reclaimed Winchester over with a barely a glance.

“I reported to Hux on my scouting yesterday. Several complaints about the railroad explosion spooking cattle and putting hens off their laying, but nothing much else from folks on claims. Didn’t find any fugitives, of course,” he winks, “but there’re rumors about someone stealing a couple rifles from the jail lock-up and high-tailing it west on a fast horse. Funny, how these things go.” He cocks a grin at Finn, who cracks into laugher while slapping a hand against Rose’s knee. She joins with his amusement after a tense moment, eyes fixed on Dameron.

A challenge.

The gunslinger shrugs at her fierce expression. “Took another report in the evening about where the line's nitro is being stored. Can’t be too careful with these things, not after the accident last time.” Another wink. Rose is uncharmed. “There’s a covered wagon with strapped-down tarps holding the crates, and it’s got two or three guards round the clock. Canady’s lent some deputies to work in shifts, too. But the rest of the tracks don’t have much oversight.”

“So we should be able to plant the charges,” Rey confirms, tracking the conversation with minute attention so she won’t shift against her trousers’ seam, aching for relief.

“Yes. The line’s running about a mile from Sweet Springs as of yesterday, so we’ll be looking to do our piece in the next couple days.”

“We’ll need to be—”

“What day is it?” Leia interjects.

“June seventeenth.”

“No, the weekday.”

Dameron’s mouth crooks in understanding. “Well now, you’re a clever lady, Mrs. Organa. Today’s Saturday. Hux needs to show himself off at church on Sunday, along with all his toadies. God, I hate a righteous man.” But there’s no venom in his voice, only glee.

“Which means that he and Canady cannot be watching the line.” Leia nods. “And even if their deputies were to notice something unusual while we’re setting our charges, they won't be able to alert Hux and the sheriff without revealing that there’s some trouble; they would have to barge in and interrupt the church service to pass on their information. Hux would be very displeased at this break in protocol, I'm sure. By the time they can relate what they've seen discreetly after the hymns, we will have removed or hidden any evidence—”

“And hightailed it out of dodge,” Dameron returns her nod. “Besides, Hux keeps claiming to Snoke that nothing’s gone wrong with his pet project. Nothing to threaten investors’ interests. Seen the telegrams myself. So if those deputies don’t want him to shoot the messenger, they won’t tell him about any funny business until after the service. And they'll have to tell him somewhere private, too, where no one could overhear and wire on the information to Snoke. Hell, they might not tell him at all. Because we all know what happens to folks who get on Hux’s wrong side.”

Ben snorts. His shadow falls across Rey’s shoulders as he hefts his Winchester. A threat and a promise. She shivers, whisking away a droplet of water skittering down her nape.

“Then we plant our explosives on Sunday,” she says, pleased that her voice is steady even while her belly lurches. “We’ll do it early, when there’s still some cover from the mist. It won’t burn off for a few hours, even at this time of year. Long enough to get everyone into church. Then we set off the charges and nitroglycerin when a train comes through in the next day or so.”

Sunday. _Tomorrow._

No one opposes Rey's plan. It’s a good one; they’re unlikely to find better timing. Leia inclines her head with agreement. Dameron bares his teeth in an anticipatory, predatory smile. Finn jerks his chin, hand tight on Rose’s knee. She pats his wrist with her plump cheeks contracted above thinned lips. Her eyes are dry and hard.

They’re doing this.

It’s insane.

It’s happening.

“Well, I’ll need practice with this beauty if I’m to be any use as a marksman.” Leia strokes her new rifle’s stock.

Dameron tips his hat. “I’d be happy to show you, ma’am. She’s got a bit of a kick, but I think you can handle her.” He offers Leia his arm—she swats away his hand when it becomes too familiar—and they saunter off behind the smokehouse to shoot at stove kindling.

“Can I see the whiskey bottles?” Rose asks.

“I’ll cut up the rags,” Finn offers.

Rey provides the bottles from her cellar, averting her eyes from questions about why she has such a bounty beneath her floorboards. Finn huffs out a hard breath as she hauls up her cache; she’d bet her boots that Rose has elbowed him in the stomach to snuff out an inquiry. She tilts a small smile of thanks at the other woman, who dips her chin. _Good_. Then, stripping down her kitchen for supplies, Rey hands over a knife and an old feed bag to prepare with flammable lanolin soap. Rags can be cut from the burlap and inserted into the whiskey bottles’ necks. She adds a tinderbox with flint for catching a spark—simulating a bullet’s strike against the alcohol.

“Perfect.” Rose nods again with grim satisfaction. “I’ll test how long we have before the bottles blow once they’re lit. Finn, prime these rags with soap.” She jerks her head for him to follow her. Finn trails his companion from Rey's shanty and down to the river, where poplar leaves will muffle their homemade explosives' spiraling smoke signals.

Leaving Rey and Ben alone.

Their press of lips and tongues in the river was nice. Better than nice. Much better. And she...she’d like to kiss Ben and Kylo Ren and Matthew again. Learn the taste of him, the textures of his mouth and hands. Learn her body’s response when he fastens her under his gaze, quaking her belly with a dizzied combination of nerves and wanting. But—

_Sunday._

If it goes wrong tomorrow, they could all be dead. It won’t go wrong; they’ll be as safe as they can. Canny and clever and watchful—because Rey doesn’t want to die. But if there’s a chance she might...she knows better than to waste what time she has.

She decides.

“Ben,” she says. Only his name, but he follows her from the porch and to the barn without asking what she means.

He knows.

Rey doesn’t look back, doesn’t give herself a chance to lose her nerve. She strides into the stable, her head held low and determined as though battling a fierce wind. She swings the barn doors shut and drops their interior latches when Ben crosses through to the fragrant dimness behind her.

“Rey.” His hand on her arm.

She shakes her head, _no_. No talking. Her fingers don’t tremble while she unfastens her shirtwaist’s buttons and drags her trousers off her hips. She kicks away her boots when the trousers bunch around her ankles. Her drab cotton undergarments follow to the chaff-strewn floor. Naked again, the air warm and humid on her bare skin. She reaches for Ben's belt.

“Rey, wait.” His fingers find a hollow beneath her chin, tilting up her face. And he—he’s shaved his cheeks and jaw. A fast, rough job with a knife and only rippling river water for a mirror. But he’s culled back his beard.

“You should’ve kept it. For concealment or disguise.” That’s what Rey means to say, to chastise him for this lapse in judgment.

What she says instead is, “ _O-oh._ ”

Ben nods at her foolish little sound. His hooded gaze sears her nakedness. Their only point of contact is his finger beneath her chin, but she feels him. She feels him _everywhere_. His hands. His tongue. He says, “I wanted you to be able to touch me.”

“I-I want...to touch you. Ben.”

“ _Please_.”

Rey raises her hands—shaking now; she can’t conceal it. But she’s already stripped raw before him, so what does it matter? She unfastens the first button on Ben’s collar. Her nails ghost against his skin. She parts the fabric, her fingertips’ calluses fluttering his eyelids even while he fights to keep his gaze locked with hers. _This moment: holding it._ Another button, revealing scars she’s seen but now permits herself to touch. She traces old wounds, exploring their stories in a silence of pounding pulses and hitching breath. Another and another. Her fingers drift over the planes of his labor-hardened abdomen. Rey’s nails skim through a trail of coarse dark hair leading into his waistband.

He gulps when her hands rasp along his belt, her nails just barely beneath it. It’s a noise she recognizes—one she'd heard from Matthew in the barn while he planed shingles. And in the river from Ben.

She stills. “Did I—”

“ _Don’t stop._ ”

Well, now she knows what that sound means. Knows what it does to her. _Belly fluttering._ Rey folds Ben's shirt back over muscle-corded shoulders, over scars and countless faded sunburns. And then she finally unfastens his belt. Leather hisses as she withdraws the length through his trouser loops, friction heating the hide.

“Yes,” he says, before she can ask.

His waistband gives her some trouble—buttons snag in their holes, or her hands are trembling harder than she realizes. But then his fingers cover hers, sure and steady. He releases the catches.

Ben wears no smallclothes.

Unperturbed by this plain fact, trousers gaping open at the waist, he nudges off his boots. Rey finds herself swallowing over and over, saliva pooling across her tongue even while her throat’s gone dry as bone. She tries to raise her eyes from that tantalizing gap, from a stiff ridge pressed hard beneath his trousers’ seam. She can’t.

When she can't command her own feet either, Ben takes her elbow and steers her away from the stable doors, toward a shadow of privacy in her alfalfa-stacked storage stall. Where he’s laid out his bedroll on a soft smattering of hay. Where he leads her.

“I…” Rey forces herself to breathe. “I don’t want to lie down.”

He hesitates at her request and her locked muscles. But Rey doesn’t explain. Can’t explain. “All right. But are you sure—”

“Yes. I just don’t want to be...under you.”

“You’re—”

“ _Yes._ ”

“Then we can...there are other ways.” Of course, Kylo Ren would know _._

“Like horses, or bulls and cows.”

Ben chokes, face reddening with a bright flush that accentuates the stark moles dotting his cheeks and forehead. He’s either horribly embarrassed, or trying not to laugh. “Uh...yes. Like that.”

Rey hates not knowing. So she takes charge as she always does—making a choice—and drops to all fours on the straw. “I’m ready.”

Silence from Ben. He stands unmoving behind her, gaze warming her spine's dimpled bow.

“If it goes wrong, we could die tomorrow,” she reminds him. Chaff scores her knees and itches tiny cuts against her palms. It hurts. And...and if he doesn’t want her this way, why doesn’t he say so? Why would he have kissed her in the river? All those glances and aborted touches when he was Matthew or Kylo Ren. The shimmer between them. The desperation. Hours ticking away.

Why?

Still silence.

“I…” Ben finally says. A hitch in his voice fractionally soothes her bruised ego. Straw shuffles as he approaches and strokes a hand over her damp head, over her shoulders, down her spine, hesitating over her dimples. He presses his fingers into them. “Have you ever been with a man?”

Rey arches into his touch. “No.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Someone will. Whether you or another man.” _Someone always will._ Rey exhales, baring another layer of herself. “I’d like it to be you.”

She hears him swallow. “I won’t hurt you. But if you’re a virgin...this isn’t the right way.” His hand stroking her spine curls under Rey's left hip, cupping her abdomen and exerting pressure to raise her up onto her knees, then to her feet. Ben positions her with her hands braced against a half-wall partition between their storage stall and Little Bee’s enclosure. He coaxes her to lean forward while cocking back her hips. “We can do it like this, if it's more comfortable for you. More...familiar.”

“Thank you,” she whispers.

In answer, his lips brush the pulse point beneath her ear. One hand steadies her pose while he adjusts himself through his trousers. His shaft edges between the taut curves of her ass; Rey gasps at the unexpected friction. Ben hums into her throat. “Good?”

“G-good.” She gives a shaky nod.

Another hum vibrates from his teeth and into her skin, through her chest, breasts peaked and aching with that mouthwatering thrum. It centers home at the apex of her thighs. Rey mewls, bucking back against him.

“That’s right,” he murmurs along her neck. Ben’s teeth graze the gooseflesh puckering her nape. His tongue laves a hot caress.

A whimper flutters in her throat. Moisture seeps between the folds of her core, soaking her tight cluster of curls. She shivers.

“Cold?”

“B-burning,” she cracks.

“Mmm.” That hum. One of Ben’s hands trails tantalizing fingers up her ribcage, tracing the curved underside of her right breast. Back and forth, a leisurely pace. A thumb circles her beaded nipple, his calluses delicious on her skin—almost close enough, almost where she wants him—before sliding away to her other breast, beginning the same torturous cosseting that wobbles her knees and slicks her inner thighs with a wash of desire.

“I could cup you in my hands,” he tells her, voice deepened with arousal, dark with wonder. “You fit so perfectly in my palms.”

“Do it, then.” Her own voice pitches high, breaking.

“I could. Or…” His hand bracing Rey's hips slinks lower across her belly, grazing her moist curls. One finger parts them, stroking the sensitive, aching flesh beneath.

“A-ah!” Again her hips buck, craving friction against that clever finger as it dips deeper into her hidden recesses, finding her core's pliant softness, whispering along a little crevasse into her body. _Oh, oh_ —she was right, right that her own touch wasn’t enough—because nothing and no way she’s ever sought relief from her grinding exhaustion has ever felt so _good_. Ben's fingers are coarse, thicker and longer than hers. They play upon her sex as though her body’s a violin of keening sighs. And when his thumb sinks through her curls to find the nub of her desire, stroking that rosy peak while two fingers continue to fondle her opening, parting her stroke by stroke—

Rey wails into her lower lip, digging her teeth into the flesh to muffle her cry. Her hips thrust forward into Ben’s hand, begging for more, plunging his fingertips inside her. His erection pulses at her choked whimper, at the warmth of her passage. A strangled sound huffs through his mouth.

“ _Fuck_ , Rey, I haven’t even—”

“P-please!”

Ben’s chest heaves against her shoulderblades with a ragged breath. His own hips grind unsteadily along her ass’s curves. “Rey, you’re going to—without even—”

“ _Please!_ ”

 _I don’t want to die tomorrow. I want_ this.

_I want you._

_All of you._

She contorts her stomach, contriving to urge Ben’s fingers deeper with a curling heft of her hips, stretching open her core with their roughness, soaking them with her need. She swivels, gasping in relief when he anchors the pad of his thumb on her rose. Shamelessly, desperately, Rey ruts her sex against his palm.

“Rey...” The fingers he's barely dipped within her entrance ease in now, sliding along the slick, pliant walls of her passage. Ben sinks himself to the knuckles inside her while his thumb continues its perfect, agonizing pressure on her nub. Rey cants her hips into his touch, mouth fallen open, moaning.

“Good. That’s good, Rey. _Pleasure yourself on me._ ”

Mewling, she bends her knees. His erection thrusts along the swell of her ass as she takes his fingers as far as they’ll reach. His pace stutters.

“Rey—”

“Yes, yes—” She pumps her hips, Ben's calluses dragging against a thousand exquisite places hidden within her core, nerves she’s never reached with her own fingers. Pleasure sparks at the base of her spine while his thumb circles over her rose—around and around, a steady rhythm that’s as good for its momentary joy as its anticipation. Heat rises through her belly, throat working while muscles spasm in her ribcage. She can’t breathe, doesn’t want to—

Ben crooks his fingers against the front wall of her passage, against a tiny roughness there. And Rey flutters suddenly around him, every tendon and muscle contracting at once in a thunderous stroke that crunches her tight to the edge of pain—then blows her open again in a meteoric eruption. She doesn’t scream, or even keen—she sobs as joyous pulses wrack through her, shuddering into Ben’s chest while he braces her upright and his thumb gentles in its caress. “Ben. _Ben! A-a-hhhh_ …ohhhh...”

“Rey.” But if she’s softened, Ben's voice is more strained than before, taut as stretched wire, deep and cracking. “Rey, I can’t—last much longer—I wanted to—but I can’t—you’re just so—so—”

Her body continues to quiver around his fingers, edging down from her stunning release, but Rey manages to nod. She grips the stall partition and cocks her hips against his twitching shaft. Because much as she’d like to sleep for a thousand years while her body recovers and her mind processes the thought-stripping pleasure of what she’s just experienced at his hands, she also wants _this_ :

Ben, fumbling with his trousers so that they drop around his ankles. Ben, leaving a beaded trail of fluid on her skin while he shifts back and aligns himself with her drenched core. Ben, gasping as he angles his tight head between her folds, her heat soaking his cock.

“You’re so—Rey—I—”

He wraps an arm low around her stomach to hold her steady, his other hand turning her jaw so that his lips seal over hers. And Ben thrusts into her once, quick and strong. A single snapping pinch jolts deep within her core—Rey whimpers against his mouth. He instantly arrests his movement. Ben holds himself still while her moan vibrates between their lips, panting, muscles straining, his sweat mingling with hers while Rey adjusts to his girth stretching her virginity. It doesn’t hurt much after the first shock; there’s only a slight soreness from being opened by a man. Then a warm, blossoming joy at his throb inside her, too. _Ben_. Rey gives him another nod. He answers her with another thrust, then another in quick succession, arm bracing her belly.

“Good?”

“Good,” she whispers into his mouth. It is. He is.

She cants her hips. Their shifted angle hilts Ben within her in a sudden wet motion that wrings a strangled sound from his chest and across her own tongue. Tremors surge between her ribs, settling at the apex of her sex as he begins to move in this new position. Breathing hard, Ben fastens his lips over her shoulder's curve. The edges of his teeth scrape her skin as his thrusts come deeper now, quicker. His ragged, half-violent rhythm hums in Rey’s core, his cock sliding against rough, delicate nerves so that her overspent body rouses again, heats again. Pleasure blooms deep in her sex, then over her rose as Ben finds her nub and manages to grind his thumb against it in a cadence with his rutting thrusts.

“Ben— _aaaahh_ —”

“R-Rey, Rey—uhh, Rey,” he chants, voice broken as he sheaths himself again and again, his thrusts angling her exquisitely against his thumb’s callused pad.

“Yes—y-y-y-yes—” Her nails scrabble for purchase on the stall’s partition, tension coiling within her belly and darting down her thighs. Her toes curl, cheeks and breasts and sex flushing, lips swollen red and blossoming with bruises while she pants, crying out his name, begging him as he pleads with her. She wants—wants— _needs_ —

But her second climax still finds her before she’s ready, before she’s prepared for its spasms of pleasure. A cry of both astonishment and elation crackles through her as Ben’s cock shudders against the hidden patch of joy within her core. Tension cracks her fingers and toes, snapping back her hips so that he chokes and falters in his stride. Her walls clench around him to drag the release from his shaft and tongue in a shout that Ben gasps against her throat, denting his teeth into her skin. He quakes, gripping her hard by the hips with his fingers and by the neck with his teeth, panting and shivering through a scalding sweat as his seed spends itself deep within her body.

Tears slide over Rey’s cheeks, mingling with her perspiration while his release continues to pump into her. Smiling, crying. _So good. So good...so good._

_So alive..._

“My god,” Ben heaves after a long moment. His voice breaks into a groan while he edges his softening shaft from her core, leaving a slick of their mingled pleasures on Rey's thighs. He droops to rest his forehead on her shoulder. “Rey…I...”

“I know,” she whispers. She allows him to hold her—allows herself to be held—for a minute, then another. Because it’s good, counting their heartbeats thundering in her ears.

How many more?

_Tomorrow._

But there’s still tonight. Rey turns in Ben’s arms and opens her mouth to him.

He pleasures her with a clever, twisting tongue, on his knees with her hands braced along the partition. He pleasures her while she straddles him, sheathing his cock with eager motions from her hips—riding him as she'd ride a bucking horse. He pleasures her up against the wall with her legs clutching his waist and her arms tight on his neck, keening into his shoulder while he ruts within her in hard desperation, panting and cursing, groaning her name when her passage pulses around his cock.

_Alive, alive._

Exploding whiskey bottles and a rifle’s rapport drown out their ecstatic cries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahem. *fans self* I did promise they'd do other things than have verbal bonding moments in the barn, soooooo...yep. ;)
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	19. Chapter 19

He wakes unafraid in a predawn darkness _—_ no scream within his throat, no nightmare pulsing through his gut _._  He's cramped and stiff from curling his body onto the shanty’s narrow straw-tick, but calm. And he’s alone. Ben groans, stretching his arms overhead and knocking his knuckles against unchinked boards. When he extends his legs, they dangle off the bed and nearly to the floor. Bones and muscles protest. Arching his back releases a crackle deep at the base of his spine. The relief is sweet _—_ but not so sweet as the hollowed pillow where Rey’s laid her head, his body cupped around hers. Her scent lingers, breathing through the mattress covering and his own skin. River water, dust, sweat.

The tantalizing, earthy odor of arousal.

_Ben—Ben—B-Ben! Ahhhh..._

He inhales deeply, and grins.

Ben's not surprised to wake with her already gone; there’s a faint breath of coming day in the cool, mist-wreathed air trickling through her shanty's walls. Rolling over to stretch again, rotating his wrists and ankles to restore their circulation, he imagines her slipping from his arms a few minutes before, moving softly so as not to wake him. Easing on her trousers and boots, tucking in her shirtwaist. Dew-beaded grasses will paint swaths of moisture across her calves as she walks to the stable. She’ll be riding down to the pastures on Little Bee now, herding her cattle to drink at one of the valley’s verdant pools, or moving them along to better grazing. Rey's chores always come first. He wouldn’t have expected anything less.

Even yesterday afternoon...

She’d fed and watered the stock, then chopped kindling with steady strokes from her axe. And last night? Ben's groin warms and hardens. It’s early enough that Rey might still return from her work before Leia and the fugitives stir. Early enough that she might slide back beneath the sheets with him, working herself low on his body so that her hips nestle over his, grinding against his shaft with dusky breasts spilling past her shirtwaist’s buttons, cheeks flushed and her eyes falling closed, fumbling with their waistbands, canting her sex, then sheathing him while he steadies her, moaning his name—

His cock makes an insistent, urgent throb against his thigh.

Even in the wildest reaches of his jail-born imaginings, thoughts unchecked by any reality save his fist and shaft, the memory of her sunburned lips seared within his skull—he’d never supposed that she might beckon him to the barn. Might strip off her clothes without a stitch of embarrassment. Might take his hand. And while he’d found a stunning pleasure in rutting her up against the stall partition, gasping against her neck while an overwhelming release shuddered through him, pouring himself into her slick, tight heat, burying his face within her damp hair, murmuring her name...it’s what she’d permitted him to do in the river that twists something raw and tight and aching in his chest.

Painful and precious.

Ben wants to pleasure her again. This morning if he can—before riding across the valley to set Tico’s explosives, their figures shrouded in a mist from prying eyes. But he...he also wants to comb through Rey’s hair. To stand behind her at the washbasin when she comes home again, while she cleans her face and teeth. Caressing away her tangles. Gentler than she’d do it for herself.

Gentler than he’d be with himself, too.

These warring urges—to wring strangled cries from her while she bucks in his arms, to hear a contented hum in her throat while he coaxes her head back into his hands—they’re a dissonance he’ll bear gladly. Because if he and Rey succeed with their work on the rail line—and why shouldn’t they?—he'll have both. Again and again, until she finally tells him why she won’t let him shelter her beneath his body. Why she won't let him gather her close to his chest while Ben pleasures them both with lips and cock and hands.

Why she allows him into her bed, but only ever beside her. Why Rey insists on staring down the leering dark with no protection. Alone.

If it takes hours? Days? Months? A year? Ben grins to himself again. _As long as it takes._ His hand slips beneath passion-twisted sheets to palm his shaft through half-fastened trousers. He’ll teach Rey to stroke him this way with her chapped, capable fingers. With her sweet mouth.

_Yes._

His erection lurches within his fist. Even the thought of her touch sends him spiraling halfway to his peak—hand working quickly against himself, mouth screwed up with imagining Rey's fingers and blunt nails making a sleek, hard caress along his shaft. His pulse gallops in his ears.

But—that’s not his pulse. A horse and rider are approaching the shanty, coming on faster than his arousal-accelerated heartbeat. Swift, clipped strides and a pitchy snort: Rey’s mustang.

Not bothering to fasten up his trousers, Ben staggers off the mattress and toward the door. Anticipation hitches his breath—for Rey to burst over the threshold with chill-reddened cheeks. To reach for him with those tantalizing hands that sear his desire. To shove him ungently back onto the bed, leaning over him, sweat dancing across her clavicles and threading along the curves of her breasts beneath an open shirtwaist—

“What the hell is _this_?” she hisses, and jabs the business end of a rifle under Ben’s jaw.

His mind goes perfectly blank, as it does with primal pleasure. And fear.

“W-what?” It's all he’s capable of saying, because yes— _what the hell?_

Rey’s eyes are furious flints, pupils eclipsing her tawny irises. But not with desire. She bears down on the rifle’s stock. Cold metal burns Ben’s sweat-beaded skin where the muzzle cuts against his neck. Is the trigger cocked?

 _Yes_.

And the safety catch is thumbed off.

How does he know? Even in the shadowed darkness with hot, vivid terror bubbling over the lust in his gut?

Because this is Kylo Ren’s rifle. The one he'd lost on the ridge all those weeks ago, when he and his men descended along the valley’s eastern switchback trail. When his horse had shied at buffalo wolves fleeing up the slope from Rey’s shotgun blasts in the night. When he’d toppled off the narrow, treacherous path, snapping bones in his leg, discharging the rifle into his thigh.

This gun’s as familiar to Ben as his own hands and cock. More familiar than his face. Yet—

“ _What is this?_ ” Rey snarls again. She blinks hard, teeth shredding her lips.

“I...it’s my…” Why does she have the damn thing? Not that he wouldn’t be glad to have his rifle back, but—

“I found it. On an eastern slope beneath the ridge. I rode out to scout the railroad from high ground above the mist, and there was _this_.” She snaps out her words between bloodied teeth as though they’re vile on her tongue, spraying him with spittle. “Just further up on the hillside from where I found you. It’s yours, isn’t it?”

Ben doesn’t dare wipe a hand across his moist cheek. Not with the barrel digging a bruise over his pulse. _What the actual hell?_ It’s only a rifle. Did she think he hadn’t carried a gun before, back when she’d found him unconscious and empty-handed on the hillside? Everyone in the territories has a gun. True, he hadn’t told her about any rifles he might've lost high above the valley, where he couldn’t retrieve them with his broken leg. But he’d been delirious with pain. And it hadn’t mattered at the time! Would she be furious to find the boot he’d left on the ridge, too?

He doesn’t understand.

“Yes, it’s mine. My rifle,” he manages. It’s not an admission; from the way she spits, Rey already knows this. Rey, sighing in his arms an hour before, opening her mouth to him when he’d licked along the seam of her lips, a little humming moan in her throat.

Rey, punching a gun barrel against his neck.

“That’s interesting,” she says with such vitriol that Ben doesn't want to hear what she finds so intriguing about his rifle _at-fucking-all_. But Rey clearly doesn’t care what he wants. Not now. “That’s interesting, because there are fifteen rounds in this magazine. _Fifteen_.”

A lever-action Winchester’s magazine holds sixteen rounds. She doesn’t need to tell him this. She does anyhow. Rey builds her damning case card by card, brittle yet undeniable. Ben sees where she’s leading, but he doesn’t know how to stop her—

“Since there’re only fifteen rounds, that means this rifle’s been fired. Doesn’t it? Unless you’re in a firefight, you always reload. Always. Even after a single shot. _Reload._ It takes ten seconds, if you’re slow. So reload. Always be prepared against the worst with sixteen rounds ready. Isn’t that right?”

“Rey—”

“ _Isn’t that right?_ ”

Ben chokes on the cold metal blockage at his throat. “Yes.”

“I heard another shot that night. Someone else firing a gun. A rifle. Someone on the ridge. And this magazine has fifteen rounds. I can account for my slugs. I know how many wolves I killed. I put a bullet through a broken-legged horse’s head. There’s only one round I’m not sure of: a second shot I fired up the slope after that buffalo wolf pack. One round. Well, you had a bullet hole in your thigh when I found you on the hillside. I thought I must’ve hit you, impossible as it seemed. A blind shot in the dark. I wasn’t aiming for you. I didn’t even know you were there.

“All this time, I’d forgotten about that other shot. The one that didn’t come from my shotgun. The one that came afterward. There was so much else to do and think about, and I...anyhow. There was no slug in your leg to retrieve, to compare against my own rounds. I didn’t have any way of knowing whether it was really my bullet that struck you. Which was lucky, wasn’t it? Because there are fifteen rounds in this rifle’s chamber, and I think the sixteenth one went through your leg. You never reloaded, because _you’d shot yourself._ ”

She’s spoken with a hissing softness, yet Rey’s accusations clang against his eardrums. Their bitter shocks reverberate in the silence.

 _Hell and damnation._ That’s what this is.

Ben looks up at her, at her fury, at moisture glittering in her eyes. Tears for his betrayal even while the rifle’s steady in her hands, her finger crooked around its trigger. Because this _is_ a betrayal. Of her trust, of her truth.

Her guilt.

He’s hurt her.

So he whispers, talking a skittish colt down from its frightened rage. She’s left him only his words. Perhaps they’ll be enough.

“I didn’t mean to lie to you, Rey.” More lies, weighing down her brave, square shoulders when she's already endured so many—and from so many men. “I was delirious. Whiskey and pain. And I wanted the pain to stop. Just that. If you’d known you were blameless, would you have helped me? A man on your ranch? A stranger? I didn’t know you, didn’t trust you. I wanted to survive. So I let the lie live.”

“You—you— _lying_ —” Her grip wavers now on the rifle’s stock, hands clenching dangerously near its trigger. “Even after—when you were— _Matthew_ —you should’ve known I would’ve helped, even though—that I—and now, still—” The barrel’s pressure intensifies on his windpipe. He sputters and gasps, eyes crossing to see whether Rey's finger will make that fatal twitch.

But abruptly, she shakes her head. Nostrils flaring, Rey jerks the muzzle away and flicks its safety on. Kylo Ren's rifle clatters to the floorboards. Breath and shoulders hitching, she buries her face in her fingers, digging nails into her cheeks and forehead.

“O-oh, _damn it_ , Ben. _Why?_ ”

Though his throat aches, Ben wills himself to speak gently to her through the bruised, rasping flesh. If there’s even a chance she’ll listen... “Because I was afraid. I was afraid that if you knew any part of truth, you’d send me away.”

Another ferocious shake of her head loosens Rey's hair from its lopsided bun. “I wouldn’t—”

“You did. After you saw the Sweet Springs posters. You found out one truth, and you sent me away. I don’t blame you for it. God, of course I don’t. I thought you were going to shoot me on the spot.” He quirks his mouth—and he can even make a rueful smile through his discomfort, because she’s listening. She is. Face hidden still behind her hands and scratching nails, but listening. And she’s called him _Ben_. He reminds her, “You almost _did_ shoot me.”

“I meant to.” Rey's voice emerges muffled and damp between her fingers. “I really did.”

“I know.”

“But then you showed me that...that calligraphy case. Your stories. And I...” Her shoulders jolt. “I didn’t. I could’ve, but I didn’t.”

“I know,” he echoes himself. “Rey, I didn’t tell you about the rifle because I didn’t want you to send me away again. And because I’d forgotten. I know that sounds like a lie. It’s not. Because you make me forget. You help me forget, Rey. Everything. Kylo Ren. I couldn’t stand to lose that and you, too.”

She's very, very still while he speaks. Confesses. Her ribs are motionless through her shirt. Not breathing. One moment and another. But then she draws breath, just once. A heavy sigh. And she says, “I can’t forget, Ben. I can’t and I don’t want to. But...I...I think...perhaps...it doesn’t hurt so much, with you. Remembering. And if it doesn't, I...I don’t know how to be when I’m not hurting. How to be, or who to be.”

“We could learn.” He barely breathes himself. “Together.”

Rey raises her head from her hands. Tears and blood mingle on her cheeks, glimmering in the darkness. She's gnawed her lips to tatters. Her nails' half-moon marks dent her forehead and cheekbones. She’s so beautiful.

“We can teach each other,” she says. Rey shifts forward onto the balls of her feet. She sways an inch nearer to the straw-tick. To Ben.

He could reach out. Brush his fingers down her wrists, coax her closer. He could draw her against his chest so that she stands between his parted knees, her arms around his shoulders. He could circle her waist with his hands. But he waits.

Ben waits for Rey's step toward him.

When floorboards finally groan, he sighs in a fierce relief—yet Rey hasn’t moved. The shuddering noise echoes from her porch outside.

“Rey?” Finn’s voice, then his fist beating a tentative _rat-a-tat_ on the shanty door. “You awake? It’s coming on daybreak fast. Tico needs to get your other whiskey bottles up from the cellar.”

Rey startles, blinking and lurching back.

“I...I’m h-here. Yes, a-awake.” Her voice stutters, and she visibly steadies her breathing. Her shirtwaist's buttons take a fair amount of strain with her gulping inhale; Ben casts away his eyes before his treacherous, lecherous cock rouses from its enforced softening under her bruising rifle barrel. “I’ll bring them out.”

“Do you know where Ren is? Mrs. Organa and Tico are up, but he didn’t come back to his bedroll last night.”

“Well, he hasn’t ridden for Sweet Springs. Hasn't alerted the authorities to our plans for some clemency.” Rey heaves up her cellar’s trap door. When she descends into its earthy confines, her curt voice reverberates weirdly beneath the shanty floorboards.

“Didn’t say that.”

“Mmm...ugh.” Rey grunts as she emerges from under the floor, a whiskey bottle rolling loose from the stack in her arms. Ben props out an ankle and catches it. She nods her thanks when he balances it again on the pile she carries. She starts toward her door—though how she means to open it with her arms tottering-full is anyone’s guess. She continues, “I don’t blame you for distrusting him, Finn. He deserves that. But trust him today.”

Ben hastens forward to raise the latch; Rey gives every indication of trying to balance on one foot while cocking up the wooden lath with her other. Dawn's muted colors flow over the threshold as he draws back the door, just before she wobbles in her acrobatics or drops her precious cargo. A soft gray morning illuminates their figures within the shanty, sparking off the whiskey. And revealing blood on Rey's chin.

Finn’s jaw loosens and falls.

“We only have to trust each other for the next few days.” Rey ignores the saboteur's stare. She gets on with shuffling her flammable burden into his arms. Finn’s gaze remains leveled with a fierce censure on Ben even while he accepts the jumbled, dangerous bottles. His fingers are slack and clumsy; Rey disapprovingly clicks her tongue.

And Ben just raises his eyebrows, crossing his arms over his bare chest. He’s sure as hell not going to explain what happened.

After a tense moment, swiping a cuff over her chin, Rey bluntly warns Finn, “Don’t drop these.”

As though she hasn’t just tempted the same disaster.

Since her clicking tongue offers him no reason to linger, Finn hesitates only another breath to deepen his scowl at Ben. Then he navigates carefully down the porch steps, shuffling away to the stable with the whiskey bottles balanced in his arms. Rey watches him go, hands on her hips. Then she whirls past Ben to her washbasin. She splashes palmfuls of water over her face, rinsing blood from her lips and cheeks. Dark patterns flower in the bowl, muddying its reflection.

“Comb.” Eyes closed against the soap, she snaps her fingers—or tries to; they’re slick with suds. The brusque noise erupts in a stream of bubbles.

“Hold still.” Ben fetches the comb while Rey scrubs her neck and hairline with a burlap cloth. Nose scrunched, she rinses off the lanolin soap as he unbinds a mess of a bun that she’s scraped atop her head. He parts her hair into sections and brushes through them while she cleans her nails. He combs the lengths long, and leaves them loose.

Rey eyes the honeyed tendrils spilling past her shoulders when Ben puts down the comb. Her mouth makes a little moue of regret. “I need it pulled back. I can’t have it in my face.”

“Hold still,” he repeats. Gentling his fingers along her scalp, he coaxes back strands from her damp forehead and ears, smoothing a palm along her neck to gather up the fine hairs tickling her nape. But instead of fisting and tying off a bun, he plaits a braid down past her shoulderblades. How he even remembers to work a braid's over-under-over twisting...but he’d loved to tangle up his mother’s hair as a child, unwashed fingers inky from his calligraphy set.

How she’d laughed. _I'll never need a lady's maid to dye my grayness!_

“What’ve you done to it?” Rey frowns and tilts her head at the plait’s heft, trying to peer over her own shoulder.

“A braid.”

“I...yes. Yes...I know. I remember. Wearing it this way.” A hitch from her neck swings the plait across her clavicles. She strokes a finger along its twisted strands, lips parted. “I remember.”

Ben swallows back his need to ask her _why_. Why braided hair films cobwebs over the corners of her eyes. Why she smiles like her heart aches.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

He touches his fingertips to the edge of her mouth. Then Ben fastens on his belt, tucks his shirt over his shoulders, and stomps into his boots. He leaves Rey caressing her hair at the washbasin...but hesitates by the door with a hand on the rifle she’s propped there.

Rey nods without turning.

Never too many guns. Not in these circumstances.

Hefting the rifle onto his shoulder, he strides off for the barn. Finn and Tico are readying whiskey bottles in the yard, stuffing lanolin-smeared burlap strips into the necks before screwing on the caps again. A bullet’s strike will set off combustions within each bottle: the alcohol and flammable cloth will from feed each other in the narrow space, then explode from their confines—shattering everything within a ten-foot radius when the glass breaks. He passes the saboteurs with a nod, which Finn grudgingly returns. Tico's fully occupied with the explosives and doesn't look up. Calm before the others' hurry within the stable, Leia saddles Millie by lanternlight. She ignores Spirit, who’s kicking up a fuss about being left behind in the mule's stall.

“Dameron sleeping in?” Ben asks his mother, passing by to release the chestnut. The mare stamps a reproach at his delay.

“I wouldn’t go down that path if I were you, Ben.” But though she shakes her head, Leia smiles around her retort.

True, he doesn’t have much leeway for that critique.

Ben picks out Spirit’s hooves while his mother groans, heaving a saddle over Millie’s withers. Muscles in her arms quiver from long disuse in the jail cell. Working over his mare’s belly with a stiff-bristled brush now, Ben doesn’t offer to help; Leia would refuse anyhow.

Like Rey.

Except that...Rey’s no longer refusing him. _Letting him unsnarl her hair. Braid it. Taking him into her bed and between her thighs..._

No, he really doesn’t get to chastise Dameron for sleeping late.

“I’m not hurting her,” he says, fetching his pad and smoothing the woven cloth over Spirit’s hide. “Not anymore. And I won’t.”

“I’d shoot you in the foot if you did,” Lei returns at once. Yet she's smiling again. “But I already know you aren’t, Ben. I was awake when she came to tack up her mustang this morning. She was humming when she thought no one could hear her. A lullaby, by its sound. And you were never in the barn last night.”

There’s no point in denial. But Ben finds himself bracing his shoulders anyhow, knuckles white around Spirit’s saddlehorn. Accusations of defiling Miss Ridley, corrupting Leia’s dear girl, her sweet Rey, threats involving a knife and his testicles if he ever, _ever—_

“I’m pleased for you, sweetheart. So happy.” His mother’s voice is thick, but not from the alfalfa dander she’s brushing off Millie’s saddle. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

“You...what?” Spirit bumps her muzzle against Ben’s shoulder, reminding him to settle his saddle onto her withers; he’s holding it suspended over her with the stirrup leathers knocking her spine. He drops his tack and cinches up the mare's girth somewhat perfunctorily, not even checking whether Spirit's bloating, because...

Leia Organa’s eyes are wet.

Ben has never seen his mother cry.

Not during any of her terrible screaming matches with his father. Not after them. Not when Sweet Springs' newspaper dragged her name and Ben’s through the mud, and not when her son became a roughrider with a new name. Not even at Han Solo’s funeral _—_ when the town wanted to see her cry, when she’d _needed_ to cry to save herself in the court of public opinion. To prove to her constituents that she wasn’t an unnatural bitch with a cliff for a heart. She hadn’t cried.

But if she’s not crying now, she’s damn close to it. And _—_

“I’ll take care of her,” Ben promises.

 _Wait_ , why the hell is he promising this? It’s not as though he’s requesting Leia Organa’s permission to ask Rey... _No._ SoBen adds on, because he has just enough wits left,

“If she’ll let me.”

“And that’s enough.”

Is it? _For now_.

They lead Millie and Spirit out from the barn and hitch them at the shanty’s posts, where Little Bee is happily cropping grass. Rey passes down the creaking porch steps, clicking her tongue to the mustang. He follows her into the stable, where she’ll pick his hooves clean after their morning exercise. She wears a rancher's hat clamped down over her braided hair, her face in shadow. She doesn’t touch Ben. He doesn’t touch her. But she smiles a little at the ground as she goes, tucking her shoulder so that her plait swings around like a lasso.

Rey, smiling at ordinary dirt and loam—at nothing.

And that braid.

“Don’t. Just don’t,” Ben mutters to his mother when he hears her indrawn breath, Leia Organa unable to refrain from adding one last comment. Of course.

“I was only enjoying the fresh air, sweetheart.” It’s a lie, and they both know it.

But she’s listened to him. And that’s also enough.

A speck of movement disturbing the heavy lowland mists resolves into a creamy Stetson and Dameron’s big-boned buckskin gelding, the man himself sandwiched between them. He reins up by Rey's porch too soon for Ben’s liking. Water droplets glittering along his brim are somehow less bright than his grinning teeth.

God, what an infuriating bastard.

“I’ll keep the guards and overseers busy answering questions for Hux's final report,” Dameron says after a hasty greeting, with a kiss for Leia’s hand and a wink for Finn that lasts twice as long. “Stroke of luck, but he actually asked for one. Probably busy work to get me out of his greasy ginger hair, but you’ve got to give it to the man: sometimes him being an anal ass has its uses. He’s on edge, since no one’s apprehended the jail fugitives or a saboteur. And with the railway tracks due to reach Sweet Springs tomorrow...his telegram’s already been sent for a train to run through the day after. Saw the draft on his desk.”

Rey snorts, leading up a refreshed Little Bee who’s mouthing his bit and dancing with anticipation. “He’ll regret that.”

“You’ll make them _all_ regret it, sweetheart.”

She nods, as though this is a plain fact. It is.

And instead of jealousy for the endearment on Dameron’s tongue, Ben feels only a fierce swell of pride for her.

“Everyone’s ready?”

“Yes,” Rey answers for them.

“Then I’ll turn right around and head north. Once I’ve got everyone on the line awake and gathered for my report, I’ll fire off my pistol. An accident. So easy to forget the safety, you know.” No one objects. The gunslinger's in the saddle and reining his buckskin around— _almost gone_ —when Dameron's eyebrows suddenly skid high on his forehead. He snaps his fingers. “ _Or_ : I could put on a little explosion. Not a big one, just enough that you could see the smoke—”

“Absolutely not,” Tico growls.

“Go,” Leia agrees, mouth twitching.

Shrugging, Dameron tips his hat and fastens a deputized silver star to his lapel. With another wink from the metal and his teeth, he gallops off.

They mount up in his wake. At least Poe Dameron’s been forced to ride off into the mist, rather than a sunset. Grinning sourly, Ben adjusts his satchels. Spirit’s ears swivel at the unfamiliar sound of glass rubbing on burlap. They each carry six bottles apiece in saddlebags hanging from their horns: eighteen in all. Given the distribution of mounts and saboteurs, Tico rides with Rey on Little Bee while Finn clings to Leia on the mule. Ben’s heavy enough and Spirit slight enough that no one suggests burdening either of them with an additional rider.

Rey would never consent to holding him around the waist behind his saddlebow. She’d never lean her cheek between his shoulderblades while galloping across the lowlands for the sheer joy of wind blowing against their faces—then let him work through snarls knotted into her hair when they’re home again. Definitely not.

She’d be the one with the reins.

A cock-eyed smirk while she settles Tico over Little Bee’s rump tells him that Rey knows exactly what he’s thinking.

And it makes her laugh.

Her amusement ripples through the morning as they set off from the porch at a gentle pace, careful of their precious cargo. Passing down into Rey's pastures, they lope through her vigorously grazing herd, the cattle's ribs fattening for a drive to market or a slaughterhouse at summer’s end. Sloped hills flatten into southern downs. Whiskey bottles sing and whisper, chiming against one another when they shake loose from their burlap wrappings.

Their path skirts vernal pools, winding between wind-carved pinnacles of vermillion and sandy amber. A quarter hour passes while they ride, then a half. Mist brightens around them—the rising day's menace. Rey reins Little Bee down to a jot-trot after they’ve crossed nearly the whole valley’s undulating floor; they’re fast approaching its northern border against a sheltering ridgeline and mesa tablelands. Head cocked, she listens through the muffled, foggy air. Waiting, straining for a sound...not for chiming bottles in the horses’ saddlebags, but for Dameron’s Colt pistol discharging in whatever misguided heroics the gunslinger pulls.

Silence, heavy in the drizzle.

Nothing but muttering whiskey bottles.

Rey draws her mustang to a walk; they’re edging near Sweet Springs’ outskirts where the train is set to run through its station, now. No more than a mile distant from the platform. “We can’t get too close until we know…”

One minute. Another, daylight threatening to beam over the valley’s eastern mountains. The air glimmers and heats. Once sunlight crests the ridge, it won’t take long to burn through their concealing mist.

“We could do it without him,” Ben mutters when Rey begins to fidget in her saddle. “We weren’t planning on having his report for a distraction, anyhow. We could—”

_Shhhhhccccckkkkk!_

Straight ahead and about a half-mile away, a discharging Colt pistol abruptly blots out his words. Its crackle reverberates through the wreathing fog, startling Spirit.

Dameron’s another bastard with impeccable timing. Wouldn’t he hate that comparison to Hux!

“Easy, my girl.” Ben strokes a hasty hand down his mare’s neck when she sidles and kicks out her hocks, rattling her satchel’s whiskey bottles. He glares at the others. Millie and Little Bee know better than to look down their noses at her.

Rey’s voice is suspiciously stifled when she suggests that they dismount and spread out along the line on foot—that way, they can better control noises from their saddlebags.

Is she laughing at him?

“Ben, with me.”

But he doesn’t care if she is; Rey’s handing off Little Bee's reins to Tico and beckoning to him. “Finn, walk east a hundred yards with Tico to plant your first bottles. Mrs. Organa, go down another hundred for your set. We’ll bury ours just west of here. Be sure to hide them under markers you can spot from the ridge.”

“That won’t be a problem.” Tico says. “Surveyors leave flags along the tracks to gauge the land’s levelness every fifty feet or so. Those can be our markers.”

Rey nods. “Fine.”

Towing Little Bee, Finn and Tico disappear into the roiling mist. Leia follows with Millie as summer’s sunrise broils down across the valley, burning the fog thin at its upper layers.

“We have about a half hour.” Ben shades his eyes against the glare. They’re in the valley’s northern quadrant; this sector should keep its shade a little longer than the others. But still not very long.

“That’s enough time.”

Rey motions for him to follow after her with Spirit’s reins in hand. She walks briskly through dewy grasses rising to her knees. The blades swish against her boots, echoing in whispers. Ben’s nape prickles, but Rey only strides on. They walk for one minute, then three, the sun rising ever higher. Warm air stirs from the ground. It disturbs the mist’s moist coils, which part as they advance, drawing back curtains on a grim tableau; a stretch of barren earth with ugly twin scars takes shape before them in hideous clarity. Spikes, rails, ties. Laboring feet have trampled down the loam so that the ground is bald for yards around the tracks, as if with some wasting illness.

The railroad line.

Rey’s mouth folds into a bitter seam. “And this is only the start of what would happen to our valley,” she says. “I remember what you told me, Ben. But we’ll stop it. We won’t let it come.”

“I know you won’t.”

“I’m keeping what’s mine. This time, I am.” She unfastens one of Spirit’s satchels and eases out a whiskey bottle. Shivering with distaste or clammy air on her skin, Rey steps gingerly but resolutely onto the naked ground. A stake tied with scraps of horrible orange cloth stands beside the tracks. She squats next to it, then squints north toward the ridge. “We should be able to hit this from up the slope.”

Ben joins her on the barren patch. They scoop out a hole beneath the railway surveyors’ dowel, dirt loose under their fingers without its binding grass roots. Rey wedges her whiskey bottle into the hollow and removes its cap. They pack dead earth back around the bottle’s neck, into which Rey sticks the topographical flag.

“There...easy,” he tells her when she stares at their handiwork for a long moment, making no move straighten to her feet, to walk along the tracks to the next flag, to bury the next bottle.

“I’m glad that whiskey’s finally getting a good use.”

He reflexively bites his tongue—but Rey continues as though he’s questioned her anyhow. As though it’s natural that he would.

And natural that she would answer.

“I used to drink, Ben. A long time ago. Because it was better than remembering, at first. I didn’t know how else to cope. I was twelve. And whiskey...it filled my stomach.” Rey swallows—the briefest pause to gather herself. Then she spits out her next words, and they don't stop.

“They torched the garden and smokehouse. Thieves. Rustlers. I didn’t have enough to eat on my own. Couldn’t...couldn’t butcher the cattle they’d slaughtered. Slaughtered in pastures and pens, just because they could. Those cows had names! And these men, they left the carcasses to rot when they’d hacked off all they wanted. Little enough. Half the herd, and for what? But there was whiskey alongside our ether for surgeries in the cellar. We’d mixed it with black coffee and linseed oil when the stock had colic. We had a large herd. And a lot of whiskey.

“So I drank. I didn’t have to remember Papa with half his jaw blown away. Mama on her back. Bloody dress rucked up over her thighs where they’d held her down and—and...I drank.”

“Rey, you don’t have to—”

“I want you to know.” Abruptly, Rey stands. She strides along the tracks to the next signal flag. She digs her hands into the dirt as though she’ll anchor herself there while the story unwinds from her chest, unraveling her quivering figure before Ben’s eyes. She dredges a hole for the second whiskey bottle, far too deep. She digs and digs, and he doesn’t know how to stop her.

Perhaps now that she’s begun—digging, remembering—she can’t even stop herself.

“I drank to fill my stomach, and to keep warm at night. I couldn’t go back to living in our cabin. Bullet holes in the walls. Blood on the floorboards. Papa’s shattered shaving mirror. I _couldn’t_. I drank. But then I lost a calving cow. She and her calf. I could’ve used ether to help. I tried. Could’ve cut her womb and belly open to save the baby. I tried that, too. But I was drunk, and clumsy. And then they were dead. What little I had left...I’d wasted. My fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault. Rey, you were just a child. Wouldn’t anyone in town—”

“I went there, in the beginning. I was hungry. Desperate. I asked for help, for work. And I got offered plenty. Men who wanted my land or my body, offering to help me. I was twelve, almost thirteen. A child, but not for much longer. Those men knew that. I didn’t. And I didn’t really understand, until Poe Dameron saw Unkar Plutt pushing me down in an alley. Pushing me down on a mound of garbage, telling me we were bartering for a meal. That he’d share his dinner with me if I was a good little girl. I was scared, but I didn’t know any better. I would’ve let it happen. But Dameron shot that bastard through the head when I couldn’t do it myself. He took me to Leia.

“She was kind. But I’d lost my trust in strangers. Strangers killed Mama and Papa. They'd use what trust I had left to hurt me too, like as not. So I was grateful to her, but afraid. I’d already learned that I couldn't depend on anyone but myself. Had to make my own way. So I went back to my ranch when I was strong enough, a few meals in my stomach from Maz Kanata’s Cantina. I’d washed dishes there in exchange for food. It wasn’t charity. I wouldn’t have trusted that. Still wouldn't. Well, I went back home. I wasn’t any safer out here than in town from men like Unkar Plutt. But it was better. At least I could see them coming.”

She thunks down her third whiskey bottle and drives a surveyor flag into its neck like a knife. Rey stalks on.

“I tore down our cabin from the lowlands. Rebuilt it into a shanty up the hill. I dug a cellar. Put whiskey under the floorboards. I taught myself to butcher cattle. Cows whose names I knew. To smoke and dry meat into jerky. Setting away food for bad times. I ate to be strong enough for working, but never more than that. Never wasting anything I might need in the future. Never again. There're always bad times coming.

“I built a barn. When a beam fell on my shoulder, I set the break. Stitched myself up. Healed. I caught a mustang colt. He stepped on my foot. Splintered the bones. I couldn’t walk for a month. But I damn well healed from that, too. I've staked a right to this land with my work, my sweat, my breaking bones—something no one can take from me. My family’s name was already on the claim. So when I was twenty-one, I rode back into town and made it legally mine. _My_ land.

“Well, some men contested my claim. My good land. Tried to steal it away. On paper. With the cold end of a rifle. They thought it'd be easy, taking things from a woman alone. But I didn’t let them. I couldn’t let them.”

Rey clenches her fists deep into a gritty hollow she's dug for the fourth whiskey bottle. Her breathing is ragged, lips dry and cracked. Sweat, mist, and tears mingle on her cheeks.

“I bought a shotgun with blood money from sending my cows to the slaughterhouse. The kick from it dislocated my shoulder. Punishment. I was fifteen. I tried with my other arm when pain in my right one made me vomit. I learned. Taught myself to shoot. To patch up bruises when that gun knocked me down over and over. To defend myself and mine. Any way I could.

“But it doesn't stop—men trying to take away what I have. What I’ve made for myself. On the Homestead Act's legal paper. By force. With a goddamn train. It just never, never stops. So I can’t stop. _I can’t stop._ ” Rey slams a bottle into its hole so hard that the glass shudders under her hands. Alcohol spills up its neck.

Ben? He simply listens while she rants, while she drives herself through her words.

What can he say? How can he speak to the tragedy she’s endured? The brutality? Her staggering resilience?

To the truth? At last, the truth.

 _I’m sorry_.

 _You’re so brave_.

Empty syllables.

Spirit trailing at his heels, he follows Rey pounding up the track. He won’t insult her with platitudes. Not Rey. Never Rey. But Ben...Ben can give her a part of himself in return for what she’s shared. Some part of him to fill her wounds. He can at least offer that.

Truth for truth. The whole truth.

“I hate explosives,” he tells her while they’re burying the fifth whiskey bottle. “Nitroglycerin especially, but all of them.”

Rey's chin hitches at his voice beside her. She pats down earth around their bottle for a moment with determined concentration, face lowered. She doesn't respond with either words or looks, just lets his confession fade. She pats and pats. A whole minute. But then...then her jaw makes another tentative jerk. Rey wipes the back of her hand beneath her nose. There’s a tilt to her head while she works and sniffles, now. She’s listening. Wary, but listening.

It’s a beginning. It’s enough.

Because if she’s listening to his story, perhaps she doesn’t have to feel her own. Just for a little while. The unspooled rawness Ben witnesses through her eyes and deep within her chest can scab over. Just a bit, so the wounds she’s exposed to him won’t hurt so much.

Perhaps they’ll heal differently than before. Better.

Ben hopes. He continues:

“My father would’ve made a good outlaw. The sort in paperback books and cheap magazines. I don’t know how he and my mother stood each other long enough to fall in love, let alone get married. But they did. Even if they fought, and he wasn’t the best husband to her...he was the sort of man boys idolized in stories. Clever, tall, quick with a gun. Always one step ahead, always a little dangerous. Sometimes, we’d play at being robbers. We'd escape dinners with doilies and confusing forks that my mother was hosting for important people in Sweet Springs, and we'd eat with our fingers. Swear bad oaths. Make up tall tales and adventures for ourselves. _Ben_ became _Ren_ on nights like those—the mayor’s son, a brigand. It was only pretend. And I loved it.”

“ _Ren_. Kylo Ren.”

“Stupid name. But it seemed like an outlaw’s when I was seven or eight.” Ben huffs his laughter, a little bitter. And beyond grateful that Rey's still here. Still listening.

“Other fathers took their sons shooting clay pigeons or tin cans. Not Han Solo. He got his hands on a bottle of nitroglycerin. I never knew how, exactly. But he did jobs around the town that Leia didn’t approve of, and got paid other ways than with dollars. She wouldn’t let him take me along while he worked, even when I begged to go. _Later, kid,_ he’d promise me. Well, he got the nitro somehow. He’d fill up saloon shot glasses on rocks out back from the house, and we’d use them for target practice. If we hit them, they’d explode.

“Leia hated it. Said one of us would lose a finger. She was wrong. He lost a lot more.”

He stops. Ben’s next heavy inhale shreds his throat. Because this part...but he can tell her. He can tell Rey. Rey, who leaches out his darker poisons. Not all of them—no one can do that for him. But some. _Somehow_. Those chapped hands and doe eyes. Her fierce will sheltering so much fear, sheltering him. He needs to tell her.

“I never meant to shoot my father. But he was refilling our glasses from the nitro bottle after some had tipped over—I'd missed and hit the rock beneath them, like always. The gun went off in my hands. I was a terrible shot. I never hit the nitro. But that time, I did. And he was gone. Hardly anything left to bury. I didn’t have Leia’s poker face, the way she kept her grief locked inside—so it seemed that she’d never loved him at all. And I felt so guilty. I couldn’t hide it. Everyone saw. They saw my shame, and they whispered, assumed...I hated being Ben Solo. It was better being Ren. Kylo Ren.

“I shot out windows on Main Street. Filched from shopkeepers. I fought—all the time. Worse things, too. Because if everyone in Sweet Springs already looked at me like I was rabid, like I was a killer, why should I convince them otherwise? Why should I bother? They only saw what they wanted to see.

“Leia sent me to my uncle on his claim. To straighten me out, get me away from all those mutterings in town. The pity, the disgust. But I ran away from Luke. I came home. I didn’t know where else to go. And it was worse. The prodigal son no one wanted, when all _I_ ’d wanted was for my mother to forgive me. I wanted to forgive myself, but I didn’t know how. And she didn’t show me the way. Because she blamed herself.

“Well, I was big for my age. I wasn’t afraid to use a gun. Not anymore. The worst thing that could've happened already had: I’d killed my father. I’d read every book from the lending library about outlaws and thieves and bandits. Read them with him. So I knew I needed a gang. And once I started looking, I found other boys like me. Halfway to manhood, but with no one teaching them how to be good men. Not out here. I took six for my crew. The _Ren Seven._ I liked how it sounded. We had a plan: rob Sweet Springs' bank, then head east for the cities.

“Only, we were boys playing at bravery. Sheriff Dameron picked us off one by one when we came for the vault. When we wouldn’t surrender. When we were too naive to think death could touch us. Too in love with our codes, our stories. He spared me, for my mother’s sake.

“She made it easy for me to break away from my captors. To run. I didn’t understand that then. I only saw the posters she’d printed up with horrible crimes and an insulting reward. So I ran. I ran, and I made myself into the man on those posters. Became him. Brave, ruthless. Fearless. I recruited other men like Kylo Ren over the years, using those crimes as my past. Kylo Ren’s history. A new Ren Seven. And we were more successful than my first gang. Robbing banks, taking hostages, stealing horses. Because we were real killers, not children acting out a game of sheriffs and outlaws. If we were looking for glory like the Sweet Springs boys...we weren’t stupid enough to get killed for it.

“I don’t blame them for running when they could. Saving their skins. There’s no code for real outlaws, nothing about leaving no man behind. Stick together for firepower, but only until it's every man for himself in a fight. Then save your own hide. Just—”

But Ben's tongue stutters against his teeth on that last sibilant syllable. He chokes awkwardly to a halt.

Because he’s breathing in fierce gasps—and he’s run out of words. There's nothing more. Abruptly he finds himself at his story’s end, as though he’s been sprinting for miles or years—and he has. Only now, he’s finally stopping to catch his wind.

He’s given himself to her. All of him.

All except one very last thing—so fresh and sharp, so painful and lovely. Which Ben's not yet ready to say.

To tell her.

And Rey? She doesn't demand this last part of himself. Perhaps she doesn't know. Not yet. Instead, she simply covers his hands with hers around the sixth whiskey bottle. Her fingers no longer shake. Memory’s icy sweat has cooled from her palms, leaving them chapped and dry. Gentle. So familiar to him. They’re steady. Her voice is steady too, when she says, “That’s not what you’re doing now.”

“What?”

“You’re not just saving your own skin, Ben.”

“No. _No._ ” He draws back. Wrenches himself away so he won’t clutch her in desperation for her assurance, her compassion. Because he doesn’t want her to—to—he needs her to see him as he is. “Don’t romanticize me, Rey. _Please._ That’s what I’ve tried to explain, how thinking that way—”

“I’m not.” Rey raises hazel eyes brighter than the sun-laced mist. “I’m telling you what I see. Not Kylo Ren. Not Matthew. _Ben Solo._ ” She touches his cheek with gritty nails, cradling him in her palm. “ _My_ Ben. And we can do this. Together.” She gestures at Spirit’s empty satchels, at surveyor flags stuck into their buried whiskey bottles beside the tracks. Not yesterday’s destruction, but salvation for tomorrow. Not just saving Kylo Ren's skin _._ “We have.”

Because they have. _They really have._ Rey threads Ben's fingers through hers. They walk back together to Leia, Finn, and Tico.

Somehow, they’ve done it.

Planting their explosives has gone off without a hitch—the most perilous part of the job. Which should be reassuring; they have the situation under control. Rey has everything in hand, as she always does.

Including Ben. Ben and his fear.

Yet even while he marvels at her scarred fingers twined with his, the solidity and realness of them, their plotting's peculiar ease twists a nervous pang in his gut.

 _No, not nerves._ It's something more than that.

Ben's as happy as he’s ever been, and he’s afraid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lotsa plot-sa! And story time for the darlings. Progress!
> 
> And goodness gracious, y'all have made me blush with your comments on Chapter 18. Oh my! <3
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, folks...here's where I'll remind you to be careful of the graphic violence warning. This chapter gets _[rough](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/post/180842183985/content-warning-for-ress-you-know-how-theres)_.

Sunlight roasts the exposed skin between Rey's hat and her darkest shirtwaist’s collar. It's only mid-morning, but the garment's drab fabric is already damp with sweat. Gritting her teeth, she wriggles further into a patch of scrubby chaparral shade. Dust coats her gums when she grunts her discomfort at an unusual contingent of underthings scraping her ribs. Her hipbones feel permanently dented. Rey's breasts ache from the abrasive pressure, and her nipples are raw. But there’s no seeking relief in her lowland river’s cold, numbing currents. Not now. She’s high on a ridge above the railroad line, having led Little Bee up treacherous switchback trails, past Luke Skywalker’s cabin, twisting through crevasses and around hideous, narrow chasms, following Ben on a path he’d marked out across the ridgeline. Lying flat on the hillside, shoulders and hips hunched onto a spit of earth just flat enough for tenacious chaparral to grow, she can aim her gun's barrel down the slope—a straight shot at surveyor flags stuck into her whiskey bottles on the tracks. These bright targets hang lifelessly in the hot, still air, not a single breath of wind threatening to blow a slug off course.

She can see everything—miles and miles of the valley laid out before her. Towering pinnacles, a cattle herd in miniature, shanties like her own making gray specks against the verdant lowlands. Sweet Springs. A railway station just north of the town, a sign spelling out its name in painted letters. A timetable's likely posted too, listing the train’s schedule as though nothing can possibly disrupt its coming. Arrogance! Rey sees all this, and all that she’s about to destroy.

But she can’t see Ben.

That’s good. He’s concealed with his Winchesters in another patch of scrub brush further along the ridge, primed to take out a third section of track after Leia blows her own on Dameron’s lead. Rey is stationed closest to the line’s end. A tarp-covered wagon that Dameron's identified as containing the nitroglycerin sits directly in her crosshairs. Sighting amid a lineup of supply carts, piles of cut lumber, and stacked railroad ties, she’ll fire on it as the locomotive passes. Her explosion will blast the train straight to hell just before it screeches along the last hundred yards of track to Sweet Springs' station—where Hux’s tiny, ginger-haired figure stands ready to cut a ribbon and twist up his thin lips for photographers. A crush of parasols and tall hats have gathered at the railway stop, too. Fools, ready to admire the infernal invention Hux has brought and wrought upon them, to applaud its supposed progress for the territories.

Yes, fools.

On the ridge’s far side, Finn and Rose wait with saddled horses in a shallow-sloped, sandy pine copse.

None of them have spoken of it, yet they’ve each packed their saddlebags with anything they can’t afford to leave behind if the worst happens. If they have to run. Spare rounds and blankets, yes, but Rose has also tenderly tucked away a braided straw that Finn plaited to amuse her one lazy afternoon. Ben’s wrapped up his calligraphy case. Small things, precious things in their satchels.

Except for Rey’s. While the others bundled and packed what little they had to call dear, she’d been busy within her shanty. Not folding her mother’s quilt or cutting scraps of blue satin memory from her dress. _No_. She’d hammered with a mallet instead, scraped and trimmed through iron with a butcher’s blade, pierced holes with an awl. She’d filled Little Bee’s saddlebags only with burlap sacking and stones. Armor across his withers, a facsimile of a burden.

She can’t run.

But Ben can’t know this.

If it all goes wrong, he needs to flee. And he won’t, if he thinks Rey won't follow. Not after they’d clung so tightly together last night, every shared breath a promise.

For Rey, crying silently in his arms, each whispered exhalation had also been a lie.

She doesn't want him to leave her. Of course not— _I’ll come back for you, sweetheart._ Rey shudders at those horrible words, against her sweat under the sun. But she wants him safe. _My Ben_. If push comes to shove, he has to run. Even if it means leaving her behind. Because she...can't leave.

He has to leave her instead.

He can't know what he's doing.

So now she waits on the ridge. Damp beads drip off her clavicles. Her shirtwaist sticks a moist plaster on her back while the sun crests toward its zenith. Rey scrunches up her shoulders to protect her arched, straining neck. Her ribs are flattened more painfully than any corseted lady’s.

Far below, figures little taller than her fingers shuffle on shackled ankles—hauling supply wagons into order, dragging cluttered spikes and ties clear of the tracks, urged on by an overseer’s harsh, lashing voice. _Hurry. It’s almost time. High noon._ Their chains will be hidden from sight when the locomotive passes, of course. No one wants to acknowledge that enslaved labor's paved the way for this coal-powered monstrosity. The railroad is supposed to be a stride for progress, bringing order, invention, and a new freedom to all in the territories—or so Dameron has reported from Hux’s speeches, sneering his disdain at the platitudinous newspaper articles.

Because _all_ means men like Armitage Hux. Men with land holdings, and skin pale enough to burn from a day’s work in the sun.

But slavery has been unlawful for more than a decade, and Hux prides himself on a punctilious legality in all things. So the railroad workers’ condition will be explained nicely away—they receive a few dollars for their labor, don't they? Whenever the overseers remember to pay them. That, or some other farcical rationale issued from behind a well-polished desk, dark curls of ink approving horrors. Those chains might really be for leverage, the better to collectively haul at heavy objects. After all, there are so many weighty things on a railway line! And so many excuses too, permitting folk to smile when the locomotive puffs into its station. To unironically hail progress and freedom.

Disgusting.

Rey watches while the workers are herded into position like cows shown at market. Wagons are driven before the rows of shackled men and women, concealing their bound ankles behind wheels and shadow. They’ll be made to grin and wave when the train comes in, she doesn’t doubt. To pantomime joy that the fancy, willfully blind folk at the station may truly feel. That, or suffer a lashing when their next day’s labor on the track begins. Rey’s seen a whip's fading silver marks on Rose’s shoulders; Rose had only nodded at her revulsion and turned away.

But for now...one by one, the supply wagons form up their ranks under overseers’ watchful eyes.

Including the nitroglycerin cart, deputies flanking its four corners.

Hauled in front of the chained workers.

Left there.

Where Rey’s slug will wrack an explosion through the wagon’s flammable contents, setting off bottle after bottle in continuous combustion, reducing anything and everything to shattered grit within a ten-yard radius.

_Oh, sweet lord._

No. No, no, no, no...

It’s not fair. Not when she’s so, so close! Because there’s no way to—she can’t—

_She can’t._

Weighing their lives in the balance. Making a choice. Knowingly killing all these people in pursuit of a greater good—she’d be no better than Hux. The chained workers are a human shield, and their blood will be on Rey's hands if she sets off her explosion. Their ghosts, their guilt in her skull.

She can’t do it, can't pay that price—not even to stop the train. A train—

Whose puffing, whirring whistle sounds in the distance. 

Rey's pulse leaps to a gallop, thumping so hard under her ribs that each breath is an effort against its arhythmic pace. The ragged, thudding muscle bruises itself on her undergarments.

That train—how many miles away? Sound carries through the valley in queer, magnifying loops, refracting off pinnacles and sweeping along waterways; the approaching locomotive could be ten miles distant, or ten minutes. At least the whistle’s laborious scream indicates that it’s not moving very quickly. Not on new tracks, in new territory. There’s still time. But—

She needs to get those workers away from the nitroglycerin wagon before her slug touches off its explosives. And she can’t do what has to be done from her spot on the ridge, high and hidden and safe.

Rey doesn’t have time to be clever, to plan and plot and consider contingencies. She’d suspected something would go wrong today after their smooth work in planting the whiskey bottles. Something always goes wrong for her, so it’s not a shock, not completely incapacitating. Rey's prepared herself for the risks she'll run if her plan goes belly up. Risks she has to run. _Hammering iron, boring holes with her awl._ Because she has no other time but now.

She decides, and she acts.

A shrill whistle pierces through her lips. _Summoning_. Little Bee snorts from his sheltered pine copse over the ridge.

“No, no...” Finn’s voice. Imploring the mustang to be quiet, to keep still when Rey knows Little Bee's nibbling at his ties, loosing his tether with nimble teeth. “Stop it, don’t—you—”

She whistles again. Her tongue feels thick, and tears spring into her eyes even while she insists. _Come._ She’s prepared but afraid. She doesn’t want to, and yet—

She has to.

Her mustang trots up through a thin stand of pines on the ridgeline. Another short whistle swivels Little Bee’s ears to where Rey’s stationed herself down the slope, sheltered behind her scrub brush. He nods his head and snorts again. _Fine._ The mustang takes one step out onto the steep, treacherous hillside. Then another. When patches of pebbled soil give way under his hooves, he folds back onto his haunches like a dog. Forelegs braced, Little Bee skids down the slope to Rey’s ledge. So obedient. So good. He doesn’t question her. He just comes when she calls, and trusts her.

It breaks her heart.

Rey fists her hands in his mane and steps into her left stirrup. Little Bee rises, lumbering precariously on the hillside's pitch. She clings to her horn for balance when his withers disappear beneath the saddle. He braces himself on the slope. He waits.

_I’m sorry._

A nudge from Rey's heels sends him over the precipice beneath her vantage point. Little Bee goes willingly and without hesitation, trusting her while they drop into nothingness for several pulse-pounding feet. One moment, two—and his hooves scrape the shale-pebbled hillside again. He lurches at the abrupt, rasping contact, knees buckling, head swinging up for balance so that his haunches grind painfully into the rocky soil. _It’s all right, all right._ Rey grips his mane. Biting her lip, she hefts her hips for balance. The mustang finds his legs after a short skid. _Good boy. So good._ Little Bee’s head descends and his haunches shudder upright. Gravity sucks at his shoulders, dragging against their combined weights—pulling him through a long, foundering stride. Another, and then his legs collect into a staggering gallop. There's no way to resist the force hauling them toward the valley floor. Momentum alone keeps them upright as they careen down the half-sheer slope. Dust billows in their wake; impossible to miss seeing its telltale disturbance from the tracks. But Rey doesn’t try to conceal herself. She can’t. There’s no time.

“Rey! _REY!_ ” Ben, screaming her name as she gallops off her precipice below his post, as she and Little Bee fall into empty air. As he realizes. “NO!”

She couldn’t stop now if she wanted to.

Little Bee barely keeps his footing while they pitch down the hillside, sliding on his haunches when the earth gives way, staggering up onto his forelegs to gallop again. It lasts forever, their descent. And it takes no time at all. Less than half a minute. At least it’ll be over soon—Rey’s recklessness. Her choice.

And no one else has to die.

They skid onto the valley floor with a jarring impact that crumples Little Bee to his knees, pebbles raining around them. But he’s up again in an instant under Rey’s pressing calves, his ears pinned forward, galloping hard and straight for the tracks.

Their descent's such an incredibly _stupid_ stunt to pull that Rey's actually bought herself and Little Bee some time. The train’s guards and Canady’s deputies are too stunned or incredulous to do more than gape at her madness, rather than raising their rifles for defensive fire. They watch her come, shrieking louder than the train, Little Bee braying—

But that’s not Little Bee, that’s Millie, and—

“Keep your head down!”

_Ben?_

“Now!”

Rey ducks. Her hat whips off her head— _crack!_  An acrid odor crinkles her nostrils. Gunfire _._

“You see?” he bellows, and then Ben’s galloping up alongside her on his surefooted mare, one Winchester braced against his shoulder and the other in his saddle’s holster. The rifle kicks back into his chest as he fires round after round between Spirit’s flattened ears. Not stopping to reload. _Firefight_. Railway guards finally raising their weapons against this doubled onslaught scatter for cover, any shots they squeeze off going wide rather than parting Rey’s hair.

Ben must’ve called for Spirit the very moment he saw Rey ride off that precipice. Followed her without question. Into nothingness, into the fray.

 _Anywhere_.

“This is why you don’t go at it alone!”

“How many times have I told _you_ that, sweetheart?”

_Leia?_

“Pump your action, dear,” the older woman tells Rey quite calmly. Just as though she's instructing her on what fancy fork to use at dinner—as though they’re not galloping straight into the regrouping guards’ line of fire with no strategy, no plan. “We've our work cut out for us.”

“I—”

“She doesn’t have a plan,” Ben shouts to his mother.

_He’d followed her anyway._

“No, Ben. Rey always has a plan.” Leia fires over Millie’s shoulder with neat precision. An ugly Smith and Wesson aiming for Little Bee reels out of a deputy’s hand. The man crumples, screaming and clutching the bloody stumps of several missing fingers. His wounds leak an obscene crimson flood, so vivid against the railroad’s dead earth.

“ _Do_ you?” Ben demands, firing in turn.

Rey pumps her shotgun’s action. Her finger on the trigger shatters a guard’s collarbone. He drops, blank-faced. Stunned by the hit. His pain will come soon. “Get the workers away from that wagon,” she calls to Ben and Leia, hitching her chin at the tarp-covered explosives. “We can’t blow the nitroglycerin if they’re in range!”

“Tico can cover that task ably, I imagine.” Leia clicks back her rifle’s lever.

They’re fast narrowing the distance between the foothills and railroad tracks, straight into range for even the worst marksmen, but all Rey can say is, “ _What?_ ” Because Rose is on the ridge with Finn, where at least she’s safe—

Leia’s next shot kneecaps a man tracking Rose Tico on Dameron’s galloping buckskin, Finn clinging behind her and looking as though he’s going to be sick after the ridge's lurching, terrifying descent. That, or with the threat they’re now facing from a marshaled row of rifles. Rose brandishes a filing rasp instead of a shotgun or knife, elbows flapping, bent forward over the buckskin’s neck and kicking him on fast, faster into range. That rasp: what she’d packed and couldn’t leave behind. Her mouth is a screaming square, shrieking obscenities as she charges the line.

“Well, Dameron better have stayed on the ridge. Someone needs to blow those bottles!”

“Never a man to risk his pretty hide.” Ben swivels in his saddle. He punches a slug deep into an advancing deputy’s shoulder so that the guard drops his rifle, howling.

“Or Tico stole his horse and left him behind while she rescues the hostages.” Rey’s shotgun kicks back into her shoulder; a man keels over with her bullet through his thigh.

Ben's eyebrows quirk at her snipe. He grins like a madman through clouds of billowing gunsmoke.

Before Rey can retort in kind, Little Bee’s haunches bunch and rise beneath her seat. He launches himself over the railroad tracks at a flat gallop, brutally beautiful. She pumps her action and fires while they hurtle again through sheer air, bracing herself against the shotgun’s recoil. It’s glorious, it’s fury and freedom and _everything_ , and she’s returning Ben’s grin as Little Bee touches down, never slackening speed—

But that cocky smirk has drained from his face. Ben’s lips pinch beneath rage-glittering eyes. His cheeks are pale.

“God damn it, those bastards,” he snarls. Six riders are galloping up along the tracks from the railway station, leaving behind its screaming, milling, pointing crowd. No fluttering fans or parasols, no tripods or tall hats—deputized stars glint from their lapels. They’re not railway guards, and not Canady’s ordinary cronies.

 _Six men_. And because Rey can count, can read the ashen fury and betrayal on Ben’s face, she understands. Six of seven.

The Ren Seven.

“They knew—I’d told them about the explosion—back when I—so they would've known—told Hux what I’d said—said about the railway—must’ve gotten caught again, probably Frank’s fault—trigger-happy moron—but it’ll have been Joshua—making a deal—remembering my words—keeping off the scaffold—getting his revenge—those goddamn traitors—” Ben's shot goes wide, the Winchester shaking in his hands. “ _Fuck!_ ”

“I won’t let them hurt—” Rey’s shotgun blasts sideways up the track, tearing into one of the riders’ shoulders while he aims for Ben’s head. But an answering slug shears a hole in her saddlebag, striking the satchel’s rocks with an angry, splintering thud. Little Bee swerves and screams. Thank the sweet lord for her packed stones, or that round would’ve punched straight through the mustang’s chest—

The train’s whistle shrieks in answer.

_No time._

Rey wheels Little Bee out of his shy, brutal on the bit. “Leia, go with Tico and Finn. We need to get the workers out _now_!”

Millie cuts away from their charge to follow Rose on Dameron’s buckskin, circling the wagon line. Leia drops an overseer aiming for Finn’s exposed shoulders while Rey picks off a guard who tries to stop Millie from galloping to the gelding’s aid. The guard's leg gives way from a slug buried in his hip; he collapses. Screeching, the man clutches his palms over a spurt of vivid arterial blood, his double-barreled pistol cocked but forgotten. The piece goes off as it strikes the ground, its shot whirring perilously close to the nitroglycerin cart.

“With me, with me!” Rose screams to the workers while Leia covers their bewildered, staggering retreat. She wields her rasp as a liberty beacon or a bayonet. Her eyes gleam in rage or terrible joy, her pursuers falling with bullets in their chests, their throats, their knees. “Link your arms for balance, and run!”

They do.

When Leia’s defensive onslaught halts momentarily as she reloads her magazine, Millie takes charge. The mule bucks up against a remaining guard raising his rifle, finger cocked on the trigger. Her rear hooves kick straight into his chest, knocking him backward so that his shot explodes harmlessly overhead. The rifle falls, and the man himself sags with a crushing dent where ribs used to protect his organs. He doesn’t get up.

“Good girl!” Leia shouts. Only with difficulty does she urge Millie after the buckskin—the mule evidences a fierce desire to savage the guard with her yellowed teeth.

This time, no pursuers follow.

While the railroad workers find their stride, hobbling along with a swift determination to escape and an equally potent terror of what they leave behind, Rey and Ben wheel their mounts over slumped bodies and around bloody slicks of earth. Ducking between wagon rows, they dodge fire from the few deputies left standing after their onslaught. They take a momentary respite behind the nitroglycerin cart, its tented tarp hiding their figures—no one dares shoot too near it. While they hunch low over their horses’ sweat-darkened withers, catching their breaths and reloading their magazines, the train whistle shrieks again. A quick glance over Rey's shoulder reveals belches of coal smoke spewing black against the noonday sky. A locomotive is visible now, steaming across the valley’s northeastern stretch.

 _High noon._ Right on schedule.

Hux will be so pleased. Except—

“Tico’s got the workers away.” Rey reaches out and grips Ben’s hand. “We only need to hold those riders off long enough for the train to come, then blow the nitroglycerin.”

“And keep alive.” Fierce fingers steadying her jaw, Ben leans out of his saddle and brings his mouth down on hers. She tastes him—gunpowder, bloodied sweat, ash. _And life._ “Keep alive, Rey. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t.” She kisses him with bared teeth and a twisting tongue, then breaks away. “Come on.”

They peel out from behind the nitroglycerin wagon. Rifle and shotgun blazing against the Ren riders in terrible harmony, Spirit and Little Bee matching stride for stride with ears pinned flat against the noise, they tear across the trampled fieldlands between the railroad’s worksite and Sweet Springs' station.

Keeping these men away from the fleeing workers. And away from the explosives.

“Reloading!” Rey shouts when her triggers clicks on an empty chamber.

“Don’t bother.” Ben jerks his second Winchester out of its saddle sheath and tosses it to her.

Rey snatches his rifle out of the air, swings it to her shoulder, and fires. _Perfect_. But if she’s quick, she’s not used to Ben's gun; her slug strikes too low, ploughing into a horse's chest rather than its rider. The animal screams and falls, legs thrashing feebly. _No!_ Rage anchors her second shot, striking true against one of those damn deputized stars—a fine target. This second rider tumbles backward off his mount, whose rear hooves kick him aside as he falls. Blood pumps in flowering bursts from his neck.

Three men remaining. Less than fifty yards away, the distance closing fast.

“That’s Joshua on the right!” Ben warns her. “We need to take him out next.”

Perhaps the man called Joshua hears these words, or reads Ben’s intent. He reins back hard and left at the same moment that Rey and Ben fire—his companions riding hard ahead abruptly shield his body. It’s one of these others who receives the rifle and shotgun rounds straight to his stomach. The bullet-shredded man paws at gaping holes in his ribs for a disbelieving moment, then sags and drops sideways out of the saddle. One of his ankles catches, hooked through a stirrup—he’s dragged behind his galloping horse, streaking a scarlet smear along the railroad’s barren soil.

“Damn it! That was just John. _FUCK!_ ” Ben pivots against his saddlebow and fires again, teeth bared beneath bloodless lips. Another man drops, trying uselessly to plug his palms over a moist, pink spill of intestines across his saddlehorn. The last rider’s the man called Joshua, still mounted with both a rifle and pistol, still galloping toward them. But they’ll take him down too, and Rey promises Ben’s terror,

“It’s all right, it’s all right, we’ll—”

Something ploughs through her upper arm.

Hot and cold, all at once. 

Rey blinks.

She stares.

Confused, she's confused. Because her palm...fingers loose and suddenly so weak. She should be cupping the Winchester’s barrel, but her hand’s splayed out like a skinned rabbit. The rifle slumps. She can’t close her fingers around it. There’s...there’s quite a lot of pressure in her arm. Muscles are spasming through her shoulder, but there’s not really any pain...

“Rey?” Somehow, she hears Ben’s soft inhalation. His horror.

“I...” She glances up past her unresponsive hand, to where her sleeve glimmers wetly under the sun. A lot of pressure...a lot of blood. How is it possible to bleed so much from such a little...little...a bullet’s a tiny thing. No bigger than a fingernail. She feels its passage through tendons in her arm, its entry point no bigger than the round itself...but the exit wound is a ragged tear that dribbles and seeps...each of Little Bee’s strides beneath her pumps blood through the fissure…

It takes Rey an eternity to realize she’s been shot.

With knowledge comes pain. It burns through her elbow, up her seizing shoulder. It burrows deep into her chest. But it doesn’t stay there, dark and secret—she thinks she might be able to gulp it down if she tries— _tries_ —but then it explodes outward through her ribs and over her tongue—she’s screaming and screaming, she can’t help it, blood’s dripping onto her saddle from the wound, she knows she’s bleeding too much—but she can’t stop it, she’s useless, her thighs are skidding on gore-slicked leather, and then she’s tilting, sliding, falling...

_Falling._

Rey strikes the ground with a wet smack of deadened flesh. Strikes her head, too. But if she faints, the gray relief doesn’t last nearly long enough. A minute. Perhaps three. Then—consciousness. She opens pupil-dilated eyes against the sun. Its scorching light and blinding heat burn into her skull. They hurt.

But now Ben’s screaming—why is Ben screaming?

“No—no, wait—”

There’s a rifle barrel tucked beneath her chin. She can’t swallow. Spittle trickles from the corner of her mouth. Rey's dizzied eyes trace up along the gun's muzzle to find a man—Joshua. His face is...ordinary. Nose, mouth, eyes. Sunburned, like everything else. Everyone else. She’d wanted to know the faces of the men who’d killed Mama and Papa. Know them so she could hunt them down and end their time in this world with a splattering slug erasing their heads. But this face...she won’t remember it. _So ordinary._ It seems wrong, but a minuscule corner of her brain that’s still articulate—still functioning as anything other than an animal scream—decides that this doesn’t really matter. She’ll be dead in a minute, so she won’t remember him anyway.

“Joshua. Joshua! _Fuck you!_ Hux, Hux—don’t hurt her—I surr—”

A Winchester clatters down beside Rey, discarded onto the arid earth that’s so eagerly absorbing her blood.

Ben’s rifle.

No—no, he can't surrender, because—the train—

“ _No!_ Ben, don’t—”

Leia, screaming for her son. The ground shudders beneath Rey's inarticulate limbs as Millie gallops up. Leia hurls herself from the saddle, body blocking out a shadow glowering over Ben's shoulders.

 _Ben_ —kneeling beside Rey and shouting her name, his hands outstretched for her while Joshua’s rifle notches under her chin. Sheriff Canady holds a pistol to his head.

“Hux. Hux, listen to me. I’ll go quietly with you. I’ll go quietly, but do not hurt him. I’ll tell those people at the station whatever you wish me to say. I’ll take the blame for the explosions. For all of this. I’m the one who’s done you injury, Armitage. Not Ben. Not Rey—”

“No.”

Hux’s voice, greasy as pomade, hissing like a cottonmouth. Of course he’s come. He’ll have stepped away from his ribbon-cutting ceremony, hoping to mop up the carnage before his train pulls into the station. Before all his lies to its investors are undercut by the mess, his triumphant photograph for order, progress, and law showing a battlefield.

But it’s too late for that, and he knows it.

“No, I don’t think so. The time for any words of yours is long past, Leia Organa. You never should've been permitted a public forum for your speech at all. And you’ve done me an injury today beyond any possible reparation. I will not tolerate it. You,” speaking to Joshua. “The Sweet Springs mayoral office recognizes your service in alerting officials to a potential disorder in the railway's business. As a token of good will, you may shoot the girl. Then Ren, then Organa. I will consider your debt discharged. You will not face the scaffold for any previous offenses committed against the law. Canady, you will sign to this execution for the man known as Kylo Ren. What a tragedy that these others should be caught in a crossfire between your deputies and the outlaw.”

“Sir.” Joshua, accepting Hux's terms. Saving his skin.

There’s already so much blood soaking through Rey’s shirt. What’s a little more?

She closes her eyes. Yet rather than finding the vulnerable hollow beneath her throat, Joshua’s rifle discharges into her chest with a metallic whine. _Neater_ , she supposes with very distant interest, while nerves and muscles scream in primal panic. Less likely to splatter anyone’s boots with her head's soft insides—when there are photographs to be taken and handclasps to be exchanged. But then the pressure of a slug fired at point-blank range against her body crushes her breastbone, and even that little trickle of thought goes dark. Rey chokes, breath emptying from her lungs.

“Now Ren.”

_No..._

“Kylo Ren.” A sigh from the man who’s calmly murdered her to clear a debt. “We meet again. Or, have you taken a new name? A new name for your new company? Women and fugitives. Or perhaps you're Ben Solo again? Such a disappointment, no matter what you call yourself. To me. To this woman who must be your mother. To that girl. Did you love her, I wonder?”

“Go to hell!” Ben’s voice, breaking.

 _No, Ben...let him talk._ If Rey can just have a minute, trying to breathe...pressure on her ribs...but it’s not so bad...

The locomotive shrieks its excitement.

“Quickly. I want this over and cleaned up. Drag the bodies away. Whatever you have to do. I need to be at my station to greet the train.” Hux isn’t going to let this other bastard monologue, then.

_Damn it._

“Rey, _Rey_ —”

 _Did you love her, I wonder?_ Ben’s sobbing, reaching for her. _Yes._

Rey answers him, _yes._

She could’ve told him. Told him so many things.

There hadn’t been time.

He would’ve tried to stop her.

And there’s no time now, either. 

Rey grits her teeth, struggling to breathe around a fierce, hollowed ache in her ribcage. To calm herself against the lung-dampening pressure and pain. Accept it, move through it. Because if there’s going to be no monologuing—

_Now._

Her functional left hand snakes out. She seizes Ben’s fallen Winchester, swinging it up with the butt braced against the ground under her arm. And Rey fires. Joshua’s triumphant face shatters above her, blown into shards of gristle and bone. Canady takes two bullets deep into his protruding gut, bowling him backward. Hux? He shrieks and raises his hands in horror so extreme it looks like pantomime—he carries no weapon. He's promised civilized order to Sweet Springs and the railway investors; no need for respectable folk to carry guns for fear of shootouts on Main Street.

Besides, no holster would match his funereal festival suit.

Rey slugs him in the arm, then the knee in quick succession, knocking him about like a ragdoll until her trigger finger clicks on an empty magazine.

Only then does she release the rifle. Her quivering arm droops, the barrel’s weight tearing loose buttons from her shirtwaist as it wrenches her shoulder. Shoddy seams split along her ribs and collar, revealing a rough metal plate strung around her neck. Hanging over her chest. Joshua’s bullet is squashed flat and buried at the center.

It's her ruined frying pan’s bottom.

_At last, good for something._

Rey'd grin at the timing for this reveal, if she weren’t so sure she’d fall prey to hysterical laughter. And if she laughs, she’ll never catch her breath again.

_She’s killed them, she’s killed them…_

I’ve _killed them._

Finally.

“R-Rey? Rey…” Ben stumbles over her name, halfway between blessing and cursing her. Bewildered, infuriated, disbelieving.

“I...I’m all right.” Her lungs have shrunken to the size of walnuts. Her voice grinds in her chest. Hurts. “It’s...it’s just my arm. S-sorry. Didn’t tell you…couldn’t tell you...would’ve tried to stop me...but had to let him think...”

Ben struggles over a shaking inhale. The hands he’s extended for her body clench into fists. He glares at her, tears streaking through sweat and gunpowder grime on his cheeks. Then he draws another breath, and he’s bellowing louder than the coming train—

“God _damn it!_ What the— _what the hell_ , Rey? You’re damn right, I would’ve tried to stop you! You—you thought you were fucking invincible with that stupid thing—didn’t you? That’s why you rode straight into—”

“I had to try. Knew something might happen where I—I—”

He pounds a fist into the dirt, a wordless roar cracking past his lips. But then Ben abruptly cuts off Rey's stammering explanation with, “I should’ve wrecked a larger pan. You could’ve worn a bigger piece.” His voice is curt as a whiplash, but very slightly calmer. Yet thunderheads glower in his eyes, more dangerous than any shout. Shocked into silence, Rey groans when he rips off her saturated sleeve, twisting it roughly into a tourniquet over shredded muscles in her arm.

“That hurts—”

“I know,” he snaps, and she’s...grateful. So grateful. She deserves his anger. It’s beautiful. He’s alive. “You got shot, Rey. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“But I need to…” She tilts her chin down the tracks. A single locomotive engine races along the rails at a rapid clip, howling to impress its watchers, ready to put on a good screech of wheels at the station. Too fast to stop. Too fast to backtrack at the chaos of overturned wagons, of bleeding bodies sprawled beside the line in various states of dead, dying, and unconscious. Once Dameron blows the whiskey explosives…

“Help me, Ben.”

“Dear girl, you need rest. Ben can look after anything else that needs doing.” Leia shakes her head at Rey. Silvered hair spills loose over her cheeks, sticking against a tacky crimson smear where some bullet has grazed her jaw. She stands over the whimpering, half-conscious Hux with a boot planted on his chest. It's a vengeful posture; she's entitled to it. But—

“Come on,” Ben growls. Ignoring his mother’s protests, he scoops an arm under Rey’s good shoulder. He heaves her ungently to her feet.

The earth spins and grays for a moment—she clings to him with her left hand, right arm dangling and useless. He’s angry with her, rough with her, but solid as an oak. He’ll keep her upright. He’ll hold up the whole world. Rey braces herself against him, and steadies.

“Thank you.”

“You’ve got a lot to apologize for.” Ben sets a punishing pace, half-dragging her toward the wagons, a Winchester and her reloaded shotgun tucked through his elbow.

“I know.” She groans. “You're angry. I deserve that.”

“You damn well do. You almost got yourself killed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But you’re not, are you? You saved all those people.” Hauling her along while she shuffles her wobbling, hobbling legs toward the nitroglycerin wagon, while the train wails its impending arrival— _half a mile_ —Ben points.

Rose has dismounted from Dameron’s buckskin. She's feverishly filing at cuffed shackles on a haggard woman’s legs, face fierce over her task and oblivious to the coming locomotive. Finn and several workers she’s already liberated from their irons keep a lookout for men bearing stars and rifles. They grip makeshift pikes or crowbars, their feet braced—prepared to defend their still-bound comrades. Their kneeling, filing champion. Their desperate hazard for freedom.

To the death, she doesn't doubt.

But there’s no one left to oppose emancipating Rose Tico.

Rey grunts at the sight. Satisfaction, but she’s also coming on faint again from exertion and blood loss. She’s very thirsty. The earth shivers under her feet, little tremors threatening to tip her over. To suck away her red spillage into the soil. “No. Not sorry...”

“I thought not," Ben grouses. "Well, can you hold the Winchester? Or do you want your shotgun?”

“Pump the action for me…?”

He settles her shotgun onto Rey’s left shoulder. The action is primed and steady under his hand. They’re standing a good twenty yards from the canvas-strapped nitroglycerin wagon, but that’s close enough; closer, and they risk entering its blast radius.

Any marksman worth her salt should hit the cart's hulking target easily. But the ridgeline is shimmering...Rey winks hard to focus her eyes. The sun’s overbright on her dilated pupils. Someone’s lit a match inside her skull. It _hurts_.

“Rey?” Ben's voice, suddenly gentle. _Worried._ Not good. Better when he’s angry with her...“You're almost there. Almost finished. Can you make it?”

Her tongue rasps her cheeks. Her own voice is small. “...hold me up?”

“Always.”

The train comes with a clatter and a whirr of pistons. It closes the last hundred yards toward Rey's explosive wagon, smokestack belching, shrieking with rage that she dares oppose it—she, a tiny, fragile creature with her short life already leaking away. The noise is almost indescribable, a premonition of Hell's clanking, howling forges. The ground trembles, itching and bucking against this metallic invasion lacerating its skin. Rey sees rather than hears Ben cursing,

“Come on, Dameron, come on—”

The first whiskey bottle detonates just behind the train as it passes, rocking the tracks. The next jug derails one of the locomotive’s rear wheels. And Poe Dameron’s even a better shot than he’s claimed to be, because he hits the third and fourth bottles cleanly. Surveyor flags scatter in minuscule orange threads as flammable whiskey and lanolin-rubbed burlap implode. It’s beautiful—almost celebratory—a deadly salute as the train races on, trying to outpace a splintered disaster in its wake. Fifth, sixth, seventh—the gunslinger's shooting over a hundred and fifty yards up the track. By the time he finally misses his ninth bottle, Leia’s striding forward to fire off the tenth.

The locomotive's rails have blown apart so it can’t reverse; an engineer at the wheel locks eyes with Rey's shotgun barrel. Screaming in soundless terror, he hurls himself from his conductor’s seat as she sights on the nitroglycerin wagon.

But there’s no stopping this. No stopping her. No stopping any of it.

The train screeches past the tarp and its explosives, Ben braces the shotgun’s barrel, and Rey pulls her trigger.

_Boom._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not saying that [this scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if9p1TnDvRY) in _The Man from Snowy River_ influenced this chapter, but...I'm also not gonna deny it. ;)
> 
> Yes, yes, I'm behind on answering your lovely comments again...I've had two software releases at work, and things have been *packed*. But I'm reading them all, and I'm squealing with joy. Thank you so, so much for your kind words!
> 
> If you're enjoying _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	21. Chapter 21

Hux has left a paper trail.

It’s this little but damning character flaw—the bastard’s anal desire for order, accounting for every minute and penny and pen-stroke—which eventually enables Leia to talk down the restless crowd at Sweet Springs' train station.

“Calm yourselves! Calm!” Ben’s mother calls over the ruckus—women in half-faints from excitement, men gesturing with fists or unholstered pistols. She strides up the station’s steps with her head and rifle held high. Fierce, commanding. Unafraid of the wary and hostile looks she receives. Most of the mob holds its ground to glare straight back at her, but others are wiser and slip away.

“Calm yourselves, and I will prove what devastation Armitage Hux would’ve unleashed upon our community. What would've happened to our valley and town, had this railroad gone according to his plans.” Leia thumps her rifle against a gleaming sign that announces passengers' arrival in Sweet Springs. Nails vibrate with her conviction. A call to order. She speaks on in a strident tone, overriding the crowd’s mutters and dark glances:

“This railroad would’ve brought changes, yes. He told you that truly; swift travel between the territories and eastern cities. Progress of a kind. But many of you are people of the land. You cannot leave your ranches and homesteads to gallivant back east. Your investment is not in bullion or fancy goods, but in your acres. Lands into which you’ve poured sweat and blood for a living. This railroad line would’ve seen your pastures and orchards decayed. Metals leaking into your soil to contaminate the groundwater, killing your crops and poisoning your wells. Hens refusing to lay for the noisome stress, cattle unwillingly to graze within a locomotive's earshot.”

His mother steps up to the podium behind which Hux had planned his triumphant moment. Taking its commanding position as naturally as if it's been set for her all along, she lays her rifle across the makeshift pulpit.

“People of Sweet Springs, you know me. I am Leia Organa. I once had your trust to lead this town. We had prosperity, did we not? If we weren't so rich in coin as Sweet Springs is now, if we were perhaps rougher at the edges, we were also strong. Strong enough to withstand the challenges confronting us, because we met them honestly and head on.

“As mayor, I listened to your concerns equally. Townsmen and homesteaders alike. This earned me enmity from some of you. But while I may not have pleased everyone at all times, I acted always in our community's interest. Ten years prior, I refused Tobias Snoke’s proposal to run his planned railway through our valley. Why? Because I educated myself about both the benefits and damages of acquiescence. There were rewards, yes, as Hux has told you. But I also knew the dangers to your homes. So I refused Snoke. I warned Hux of these same risks, but he ignored them as he ignored me. As many of you now wish to ignore me. But I ask you, when did I ever act but Sweet Springs' best interests?”

A bluff.

It’s all a bluff. Watching his mother command the station's crowd by sheer force of will, gravely smiling while she exerts her persuasive rhetoric—Ben knows this. When she speaks with gleaming eyes and gesturing hands, a rising crescendo and then sweet release in her pitch, it’s easier to overlook her grim, dogged uprightness against some unspoken pain. To see past her snarled hair, the weariness lining her mouth, her scratched face, her grimy garb. To ignore rusty streaks on her trousers where a bullet has raked her knee.

She’s well aware of this; Leia Organa ekes every self-contained advantage she can from the situation.

It’s a good story she spins: resilience and resistance to tyranny. And if the gathered assembly's been denied a train, it’s been treated to a combustive spectacle instead. To the kind of shootout that only ever features in circulating libraries' cheap novels. It’s a _very_ good story; Leia Organa knows how to play to its strengths, to its emotional thrall. So she does.

There’s no one left of Hux’s cronies to speak her false.

Except for the clerk, Dopheld Mitaka. He might bring her card-castle tumbling down, but—

“I have papers. Papers and files!” He waves a crush-brimmed bowler hat when Leia pauses to survey her crowd. Leaping into the void with headlong desperation, he bids for her attention like a drowning man at sea.

Bidding for her clemency also, Ben suspects; if even half of what Leia says is true, a clerk deep in Hux’s books will see how the wind blows. And since the current mayor's incapable of mounting a defense, leaving Mitaka to take the first blame...

“I’ve got more than six years’ worth, Mrs. Organa. Surveys, memos, accounting logs. He’s seen reports on the railroad’s damage to land around other towns on the plains. He was forcing claim sell-ups in the valley so people had to move into Sweet Springs. Then he could sell off acres to Mr. Snoke's railroad at a profit, for mining and water rights. He made all sorts of notes about it—”

Leia’s eyebrows clash together at this interruption of her precise balancing act with the crowd. A sharp word hovers on her lips. But then...then Ben sees his mother adjust her rhetorical calculations quick as blinking, faster than an abacus. Strategizing. Deciding. She says, “Lead on, Mr. Mitaka.”

Because much as Dopheld Mitaka needs clemency, Leia Organa needs allies in Sweet Springs. Incriminating account books will provide persuasive fodder for her next round of speeches.

And leverage.

Ben nods at Leia as she strides down the railway's platform. Their gazes cross for a flicker of an instant, the breath between one step and the next—and then her raised boot falls. She passes back toward the town’s center without glancing aside again.

He doesn't reproach her for it. Not this time.

Not even with Rey’s blood drenching his left side. There’s so much death and slag and smoke soaking the lowlands, but Leia Organa has to carry on. Hardly limping, though her knee must be paining her. Keeping up her act—just long enough to see the next hours through. Half the station’s crowd follows in her wake, frowning, skeptical, but...yes, following. Following Leia Organa and her cowed clerk. Others remain to gawk at the field’s carnage, or to mutter new plots against a woman— _in trousers!_ —who dares claim a right to address them. To command them.

So Ben nods to show his mother that he understands. He understands why she leaves Rey behind—weak with blood loss, cheeks ashy pale. Leaves her dear girl while she looks to tomorrow.

Why she leaves Ben, too.

Leaves him, and trusts him.

“We need to get you to a surgeon.” Supporting Rey’s sagging figure with an arm circling her waist, Ben hauls her shambling, unsteady feet around a crater that their nitroglycerin has blown across the railroad tracks. The locomotive's been blasted apart into bits of rubber and metal filings. Nothing but glimmers of copper paint and glass remain of all its brutal pulchritude. Wagons' cracked spokes and splintered boards litter the ground. Sullen fires burn on bare soil, before wind snuffs them out with a banking of ash. Foul smoke hangs heavy above them, sheltering fallen bodies from putrefaction under a noonday sun.

Smothering the living.

Forcing himself not to look, not to seek out resemblances in broken, grisly limbs and slack-jawed faces to men he knows—Joshua, a traitor but once almost a friend, Arnold, William, Frank and the rest—Ben whistles for his mare. Blood cracks from his lips.

“No surgeon.” Rey fists a hand in his collar when he can’t keep his eyes from roving, from searching, a shudder in his gut. When she shakes her head, her neck lolls. Her eyelids flutter. She forces them open. “Tourniquet’s holding all right.”

“It’s not meant to keep forever.” Ben swallows, forcibly focusing himself on her. _Still alive._ She needs him. Also—“You need stitches and bandaging. There must be a surgeon in this godforsaken town who can—”

A sour laugh parts Rey’s pain-pinched mouth. “Like _hell_. I know Dr. Clark. I’d rather do it myself.”

“Well, you can’t. I’ll believe you could patch up the entry point with steady hands—but look at your fingers. You're shaking. And an exit wound’s impossible on the back of your arm like that. Not even you can do it, Rey.”

Cheeks hollowed, bloodless with exhaustion and misery beneath a grimy coat of soot, Rey leans into his shoulder. Or her knees buckle. “Then...help me? Still a few bottles...”

“You’ve got some whiskey left at the ranch?”

A shallow nod, chin bumping her clavicles.

“Can you hold out for the ride?”

“Have to, don’t I?”

She’s right. She has to.

Ben doesn’t offer Rey the choice of riding with him on Spirit or alone on Little Bee. The mustang’s painted shoulder is mottled with dark splotches of blood seeping a bruise beneath his hide, and he walks gingerly on his right foreleg. He’s in no condition to bear her. Rey’s equally in no condition to keep herself upright in the saddle. Still, Little Bee protests when Ben elbows past his expectant withers and raises Rey as gently as possible onto Spirit’s back.

“Shut up and just follow along. She’ll be fine. Rey?”

“Trying not to fall,” she mutters.

Mounting up behind her, Ben braces an arm around her iron-clad ribcage. Rey slumps back against his chest with a mumble and a sigh from lax lips. “It’s going to be all right.”

Clicking his tongue for the mustang—Ben doesn’t reach for Little Bee's reins, suspecting he’d lose several fingers if he tried—he turns Spirit away from the railroad’s splintered destruction. They leave behind Finn and Tico rasping open the workers’ shackles, Dameron striding down switchbacks from the ridge with his Stetson and teeth gleaming amid the gritty carnage— _bastard_ —to assist. The gunslinger blows apart the cuffs' remaining hinges with his Colt revolver. Ben retreats from the workers’ hard-won freedom with reluctance, and from the bodies with relief. So many bodies, the cost of what they’ve done. A cost he knows will haunt him.

Him and Rey both.

But for this moment, he slides back his left leg and eases Spirit into a canter; even his mare’s imperfect third gait will jar Rey’s arm less painfully than a jog-trot. They cross the lowlands on a familiar path that winds over the valley floor, past ancient pinnacles and stands of gnarled oaks, into vernal pools that splash Spirit’s belly as she clomps through the silty water. They rise along verdant, cattle-grazed pasturelands.

And finally, to Rey’s own porch.

They’ve returned to where it all began between them. Somehow. _Alive._

This thought must also occur to Rey. _Impossibly, we’re alive. All of us._ Her mumbling breath sighs, “Finn...Dameron...Rose?”

“Rose?”

“Rose Tico.”

 _Oh._ Perhaps Ben’s exhaustion has drained away his curiosity, but he’s neither astonished nor outraged by the deception. Just...“Does Finn know?”

A shrug, and a whimper when she jolts her arm.

“Well, she’ll have time to tell him now. If she wants to.” Dismounting, Ben catches Rey under the knees and braces an arm beneath her shoulders before she falls out of his saddle. He cradles her to his chest while he strides up the porch steps. “She was still rasping at shackles when we left. Probably didn’t even notice the explosion.”

“Mmm...ahhh!’ Rey moans when he settles her onto the bed's straw-tick. He’s lowered her as gently as he can, but not gently enough.

He doesn’t think he can ever be too gentle with her. But now...

Ben strokes back sweat-matted hair clinging to her cheek. “Do you want whiskey, or ether?”

A ghost of a laugh drifts through Rey’s anemic lips. “Funny...you asking that. Do you remember…”

Nerves twinge in Ben’s left leg, ricocheting down his calf to where the bones have knitted and healed from their break. Not painful, just present. He brushes his fingertips over Rey’s grimy forehead, presses his lips to her temple. “Yes, I remember. Now: whiskey, or ether?”

“Not ether. Other supplies are...in the barn.”

“But you’ll need your whiskey.”

Her breath hitches, a quiver in her armored chest. “Not too much. I’ll have to...guide you.”

“All right.”

Ben smooths a palm over her flickering eyelids. The exposed crescent moons are oddly clean and pale against her dirty face, her lashes acting as cobwebs to trap the explosion’s grime. Her eyes remain closed when he softens the pressure in his hand. _Good._ Ben clips through a length of baling twine binding the iron frying pan over Rey's breasts and stomach, then unbuttons her shirtwaist to extract it. She breathes a little easier when the weight lifts, but only a little—there’s a horrific bruise blooming over her breastbone where Joshua’s point-blank bullet struck home.

Her frying pan armor is such a _damn_ _stupid_ _thing_! A ridiculous buffer against death and damage.

But it stopped that bullet. It saved her life.

He’s so grateful that he burned the pan’s bottom, all those weeks ago. If he hadn’t... _no._ He won’t think about that. Not when her left fist is clenching while her right makes tiny nervous spasms.

“I’ll be here the whole time, Rey.”

“You’d better. Can't do it if you're not. But I...I’m afraid, Ben. Afraid if I start again...drink again...I won’t be able to stop.” A tear leaks over her cheekbone, ploughing through smeared ash and dirt. “I’ll want to forget.”

“We did what we had to do.”

Another tear. “I know. But...I’m afraid. Because I don’t regret it. And that’s...that’s...”

All Ben can promise is to be with her.

She nods.

When he tilts one of the cellar’s whiskey bottles to her lips, Rey swallows down the first slug with a choke and a sputter. Her throat convulses. She gags against the alcohol’s burn on tissues already tender from their exposure to gunsmoke, abraded by inhaling the explosion’s spewing grit. But then she visibly girds herself. She finds a rhythm to her gulps. Rey drinks with determination, with a practiced technique that Ben has to admire for its brutality—the triumph of mind over matter.

He hates it.

She drinks and drinks—mouthful after mouthful—until suddenly her tongue locks against the roof of her mouth. The whiskey shunts sideways, dribbling from her lips. “Enough,” she coughs.

“You’re sure?”

Rey’s chin trembles. She bites her lips, closing and firming her mouth with grasping teeth. She nods again.

“It’s going to be all right,” he tells her. Prays _._

“I know. You’re here. Now, you’ll need...”

Under her instructions, he sets out thread and a needle on the shanty’s table. He fetches doubled patches of sticking plaster from the barn. Ben scrubs his hands over the washbasin, overzealous with lanolin soap between his fingers. Then, very carefully, he unwraps the makeshift tourniquet from Rey's arm. Blood wells up through her wound in a sluggish stream. He...he’s much better at causing injuries than patching them up. He doesn’t like the slippery warmth of arteries grazing his fingers, the tenderness of flesh beneath skin. The frailty of the human body, so liable to bruises and slicing knives. To bullets.

But this is Rey. She’s afraid, so he can’t be.

Yet even so...

“Ready?” she asks him, when Ben still hesitates after several nauseated heartbeats. Blood continues to seep from her arm, but she’s reassuring him that she’s calm. That he can be, too.

So he nods, even though her eyes are closed and she can’t see him.

“Good. First...you’ll need to tie off the vein. I think...ligate?”

He gulps. Then—“I’m going to put you on your side for that,” Ben forces himself to say in a voice that’s almost as calm as Rey's. “I have to see the exit wound.”

“Do it.”

“It’s going to hurt.”

“I promise not to...scratch your eyes out.”

“Well, thank you.” She’s trying to make him laugh, or she’s drunk and delirious. Both?

Whichever it is, he’s grateful. Ben cups Rey's shoulderblades and her spine's sweet, dimpled arch. He eases her onto her left side. Her shredded right arm appears in gory exposure, blood weeping from a ragged tear in the flesh.

“Mmm...not so bad,” Rey mutters, though she’s audibly stifling a moan. “Just get...going.”

“Don’t lose your nerve.”

“Are you talking to me...or yourself?”

“Who the hell knows?” Gritting his teeth, Ben takes up a short length of thread.

This time, Rey groans without smothering her sound. “Ugh...all right. First, you need to...get inside the wound. Find the vein with your fingers. Don’t think it’s an artery...or I’d be dead already.”

Her flesh is warm and soft and wetly sweating under his touch. “Oh god, Rey, I’m sorry, I’m—”

“Can you...feel the vein? Should be near where the blood...p-pulses.” Her lips draw tightly together as Ben’s fingers wince and probe deeper. “Argh! That’s it.”

Yes, he feels the spewing vein—frayed, a loose wire in her body.

“Good. Good, now...tie it off with your thread. Slipknot or... _ahhh_...some sort of hitch.”

“I can’t see anything, there’s too much—”

“Do it by feel. You can, Ben.”

“How the hell do you know all this?” Tongue thick in his mouth, he squints into her wound’s dark, moist cavity. Nothing. Just blind wetness.

_Damn it._

But her blood's dampening the straw-tick. Not stopping. So even while he grimaces at Rey's instructions, Ben steels himself. Then he does what she's told him. Stomach churning, working by feel instead of sight, he pinches the thread between his index fingers. He feeds it in a loop around her undulating vein.

“I've done it...myself,” she pants.

“Holy shit, Rey—you did this to _yourself_?”

Her throat lurches, laughter or pain. “Hell, no. A cow.”

“Thank god for that,” he mutters. “I was starting to think your insanity didn't have boundaries.”

“Mmm...well, they're hard to reach...but I’m... _argh_...about at my limit. Tie off the string.”

Fingers slippery and shaking, he knots his twine into a battlefield ligature. Almost immediately, the blood pulsing in Rey’s wound slows. One gush, two...and it stops altogether, only a residual seepage slicking her arm. _Thank God_ , Ben thinks again without blasphemy. He inhales against a stitch in his chest, filling his lungs after what feels like hours of shallow breaths.

“Now...sew me up.”

Leaving his threads trailing through her torn flesh, Ben pokes a clean skein of string into his needle. He begins to patch Rey’s skin back together. This he can do without her guidance, he tells her. She snorts her disdain for his avowed competence...but taut tendons in her neck release. Her head dips down into its pillow. Her lips flutter on a sigh. And she finally, _finally_ lets herself lapse over the edge of unconsciousness.

 _Thank God for this, too._ Ben swipes a bloody thumb along her eyelid's crease, where she’s held back unspent tears.

Brave, brave Rey.

She’ll bear a scar to commemorate her heroics; the sutures he make radiate out from her bullet’s exit wound like a sunrise.

It’s not a neat job—the sutures stagger at wrong angles, and he’s ruined one of her few shirts. But Rey's no longer bleeding. Her wound is closed. He ties off a few stitches over the slug's entry point in her bicep, then covers both sides of her arm with sticking plaster. Having splinted those bandages under leg wraps requisitioned from Little Bee, he fashions a sling around Rey's neck and wrist to steady her arm.

Ben will have to remind her to wear it.

“It’s finished,” he murmurs, after he’s cleaned his hands and thrown out the washbasin’s murky water. He sits beside her on the straw-tick, tenderly bathing Rey's dirty face with a burlap cloth.

Her eyelids flutter. She turns into his palm.

Rey rests for the day's remainder—unconsciousness or sleep. It doesn’t matter, so long as she rests. And she does. He leaves her only once: to untack, rub down, and feed the horses. To praise and stroke Spirit for a job well done, a double burden carried. Rey would want him to. She’d be angry if he didn’t look after her stock as well as he looks after her. 

Ben doesn’t fasten her wrist against a bedpost to ensure that she'll lie quietly while he’s gone...but he smiles through his bone-deep exhaustion as he forks alfalfa into Little Bee and Spirit’s mangers.

Yet when he upends the mustang’s saddlebags, he finds only rocks. And his smile dies. But if he chokes...he also reminds himself to breathe: _she’s here, still here_. He empties the satchels. He won’t ask her.

He can’t.

“You came back…” Rey mutters when he joins her again on the straw-tick, chaff in his hair and fingers tacky with molasses-sweetened grain.

He just presses his lips to her forehead. What can he say? _Those rocks, but she’s here_. Rey’s mouth eases beneath his touch, though she moans whenever Ben ceases soothing back her hair over her temples. Eventually, he pulls up a chair to the table and opens his calligraphy case. One hand clutched in Rey’s, he lays out his pen and brushes. He mixes ink. Having selected a sheet of thin paper, he dips his nib into the pigment.

And Ben begins to draw. He’s practiced more as a calligrapher, but his pen’s poetry in motion is the same. He sketches Rey's repose in delicate lines. It takes a long time, and he’s patient. When her shape is complete on the paper before him, he dilutes his ink further into a wash for watercolors. Taking up his larger brush, he blurs its bristles over the contours of her chest so that her picture seems to breathe. Thick strokes swipe in the sweat-matted hair cupping her skull. Thin ink tracings pick out strands fallen loose from her braid, sticking to her throat. Her eyes are shadowed and soft, her lips parted. He paints the blood leaking beside her mouth, a bruise on her cheekbone. The edge of her sling cupping her wrist. All that he sees.

This painting's a raw thing.

Because it’s Rey, it’s beautiful.

Ben's ink dries while he watches her for an hour, then another. Entranced by her breast's rise and fall. Shallow, but steady. Then he folds the fragile calligraphy paper into his shirt pocket. He’ll give it to her. _Someday_. But not yet. It speaks too much. He’ll offer it when he’s ready to ask her…

_Yes, then._

So she’ll know how he loves her.

Rey clutches his fingers through the night. When she wakes and pain takes her in wracking currents, she doesn’t scream. She bites his hand instead, crying from a deep, rich agony in her arm. The afternoon’s alcohol drains from her bloodstream until there’s no buffer left between her flesh and her pain. Ben strokes her hair with ink-splattered fingers, her teeth sunk into his knuckles. He whispers her name, offering anything to take away her misery.

“Don’t want...more whiskey.”

He gives her the warmth of his body instead. He gives her the hollow of his chest, and she lets him hold her.

She’s a little better in the morning. Hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked, but Rey staggers to the privy on Ben’s arm to relieve herself.

“Do you remember?” he asks her.

“Ugh,” she groans, then hisses when she knocks her elbow on the privy’s latch. “How did you...manage?”

“You were there,” Ben grins, and laughs at her when she emerges.

Rey scrunches up her nose into wrinkles.

 _Laughter’s the best medicine,_ his mother would say.

“Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

He warms up their usual tinned beans—careful not to burn the bottom from another pan, though it wouldn’t be the worst thing if he did. Ben chops peppers from the garden, then minces a venison steak. Rey watches him work over the cutting board from where she’s slumped on her straw-tick. Her hooded eyes flutter at half-mast; he’s coaxed her into taking a few more swigs of whiskey to get through the day. The pained creases bracketing her mouth have softened.

“You’re all elbows in the kitchen,” she says now, over-articulating so she doesn’t slur.

Ben grins again and shrugs. “It’s your kitchen that’s too small. Ever thought of expanding?”

Those scrunched wrinkles furrow her nose.

“But you’re better in the barn,” Rey tells him after a midday nap, as though continuing their conversation. She’s propped against a feed barrel while Ben pitches alfalfa into the two horses’ mangers; Millie’s still in Sweet Springs with Leia.

_Better in the barn?_

Pausing beside her perch to scoop up a bucket of oat-and-molasses feed, Ben winks at her.

Somehow, Rey manages to blush. Her cheeks are pale with blood loss beneath tanned freckles, but that rosy color faintly warming her skin is unmistakable. Her eyelashes flutter in confusion or embarrassment. “That’s not what I—”

“No?”

He brushes his lips against hers without warning, startling away her retort.

Rey huffs, vexed and wide-eyed—which only draws him to kiss her again. Her blush deepens into a rouged mantling along her throat when he strokes the edge of his tongue against her lower lip. So Ben kisses her a third time, for medicinal purposes. And then again.

Eventually, Little Bee's impatient wickering for his bran mash becomes too pointed to ignore. 

After Rey tires with ordering him through the correct way to water and rub down livestock—she’s an impossible taskmaster, even more impatient than Little Bee, which makes Ben laugh and laugh—they sit together on her porch. They swing their legs and clasp their hands. They listen to the wind, to lowing cattle. They're quiet. Ben thinks Rey might even be edging into sleep again...when she cocks her chin up from his shoulder. She nudges with her nose to turn him toward the shanty’s wall, where late afternoon sunlight beams against knot-grained wood.

“I’ve finally got time to chink the boards, now.”

“You have one functional arm. How’re you going to manage that?”

She tilts her head at him. “I could make you do it.”

“I haven't chinked a wall before. I’d need a teacher, but you’re terrible.”

“Oh!” She recoils in mock offense. Rey smacks him across the cheek, but Ben captures her hand. He presses his lips into her palm, then folds her fingers around his kiss. She retaliates with a kiss of her own against his knuckles, dented from last night's biting.

So...what with one thing and another, they don’t end up chinking the walls that day. They remain on the porch instead. Their bare feet brush through grass stems and scatter dandelion puffs until evening comes in a shower of stars or fireflies. Rey leans against Ben’s chest and he slips an arm around her waist. Fickle breezes spiral hair over her ears, tickling his cheek. He combs through the strands with his fingers. Ben plaits her hair into tiny braids, then braids the braids.

Rey chortles at his concentration.

“I could teach you,” he offers.

“I...I'd like that.”

He demonstrates how to slide a braid’s sections over and under, then how to curve those sections across themselves again. Rey's a quick study. Too quick. Especially with only one good hand.

“You already know how to do this.”

She smiles, sly as a little fox.

When pain steals away her smile just after dark, Rey counts firefly flashes and braids sections of her hair with every flicker to steady her breathing. Ben counts and braids with her. Thousands and thousands. They count past midnight, numbering stars when the fireflies fade. They count until every inch of Rey’s hair has been braided five times over. Then Ben carries her back into the shanty.

She lets him tend her, hold her, gentle her through the pain.

It feels like happiness.

Not long after sunrise, Finn and the woman called Rose Tico return to Rey's ranch. They come on foot, hiking from the lowlands through a fresh, early morning while he’s on the porch mixing buckets of river clay, stove ash, and lime for chinking. Rey glances up from eyeing his mixture’s consistency. Then she raises her left hand in greeting. If he weren’t looking for it, Ben wouldn't have noticed that she’d nearly reached for her shotgun instead of offering a welcome. _Old habits die hard._ He rests on a wooden dasher staff he’s been using to paddle the chinking smooth, and waits for their company to approach.

Rose comes directly to Rey—Rey, who advances down the porch steps to meet her with empty, open hands. “It’s done,” she says simply, meaning everything. “Thank you.”

Gently, they embrace; gently for Rey's arm, but with determination. When they draw apart, Rose attempts to give back her filed-down rasp. Lips quivering into a smile, Rey shakes her head and folds the other woman's hands over it again.  _Keep it._ Rose clutches a half-moon necklace she wears, her chin jerking. She slots the rasp through her belt.

Where anyone else would holster a gun.

“We camped with the others yesterday. No one's left to claim its supplies, so we stripped down the railroad site. Took those goods, along with anything Dameron could get in town. Some folks are fixing up the wagons and heading further west,” Finn says.

“But some of us are staying.” Rose strokes a finger absently along her rasp. “With Mrs. Organa and Mr. Dameron managing things in Sweet Springs, they’re hopeful— _we’re_ hopeful—”

“She got herself reelected?” Not surprising—but even by Leia Organa's standards for whipping chaos into order, this is a swift turnaround. “Already?”

“No. But people listen when she tells them what to do. They grumble, but they get it done. Besides, there's the clerk, Mr. Mitaka. He’s had a lot to say. Even if people don’t like what Mrs. Organa’s telling them about the mayor and the railroad, there’s evidence in his books. And if they don’t care about the books, she mentions someone named Maz.”

“Then they fall right in line.” Finn cracks a smirk.

So:

For Sweet Springs' literates, Ben's mother offers the evidence of Hux's own memorandums and figures. For everyone else, there’s the threat of tiny, terrifying Maz Kanata.

Who’s apparently supplanting Dameron as the town's enforcer and gun-for-hire.

“That clerk says he hated Hux the whole time,” Finn continues, skeptical eyebrows crooked above a gloating mouth.

Rey snorts.

“He knows what side his bread’s buttered.” Scoffing in turn, Ben cleans his tacky fingers on a rag before coming forward to grasp hands with Finn. “With Mitaka heeled and Maz on her side, Leia'll be in that office before another week's over.”

It’s actually one day shy of a full week when three figures appear along what’s fast becoming a well-trodden path from Sweet Springs to Rey’s ranch. Noonday sun flares off a creamy Stetson’s curved brim. Leading a spare mount, the second rider gallops ahead on an animal with unmistakable jackrabbit ears. The third figure looks as though he’d rather be anywhere else but on a cantering horse; he clutches his saddle like a greenhorn. Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, and Dopheld Mitaka rein in by the porch.

“Afternoon, Miss Ridley.” Dameron grins and tips his hat to Rey, who props her shotgun against her hip while Ben also props _her_ upright.

“What’s this for?”

Hospitable as ever.

He and Dameron exchange a glance over her braided, sun-burnished head. They're an equal height just now, the gunslinger mounted on his big-boned buckskin and Ben standing on the shanty steps. They both raise their eyebrows. A mirrored expression—which they hastily break. And it’s not friendship in that level look between them— _no way in hell_ —but it’s something...shared. Exasperation. Fondness? Dameron’s the first to turn away. Ben’s grateful for it.

“I noticed you weren’t at our Thursday town hall, sweetheart. And since we over in Sweet Springs owe a debt of gratitude for your service—”

“That’s how you’re telling it?”

“—we’ve come to give you our latest news in person. You might want to start ordering the papers. You’ll find some stories to your liking.”

Rey shakes her head, smiling a little.

“Well, since you won’t. Mr. Mitaka, will you do the honors? Tell this woman what she’s missed by keeping her stubborn, charming self all the way out here.” Dameron winks on _charming_ —but not at Finn standing by the porch beside Rose. Not even at Rey.

He winks at the clerk.

Who flushes all over his newly sunburned face. Leia must be getting Mitaka out of his offices a bit more. Clearly, the three of them have been very busy together in town.

“Uh, yes.” Mitaka clears his throat. “Miss Ridley, you should be informed of the following:

"Firstly, that a majority town hall vote has elected Leia Organa to the office of deputy Mayor for Sweet Springs. She will maintain this interim post until a balloting day can be called. She has appointed Poe Dameron as sheriff, since Moden Canady is...permanently indisposed.” He pauses, then nods his satisfaction with the euphemism. He continues,

“Secondly, note that Armitage Hux has been removed from elected office. He awaits trial on corruption charges from Sweet Springs' jail, where Dr. Clark is treating him for injuries sustained in the railway...explosion. He will be called before a jury of peers to account for his dealings with Mr. Tobias Snoke.”

“Rattlesnakes or cottonmouths for the jury?” Rey inquires, voice dripping with superciliousness.

“Uh.” Mitaka winces. Wisely, he doesn’t rise to her bait. “Uh, it appears that Mr. Hux had entered into agreement with Mr. Snoke to sell land rights in the valley’s northern quarter. This land is currently held in trust to the town of Sweet Springs. It cannot be sold without a majority vote from affected landholders in a public forum. Which occurred per regulation. However, Mr. Hux had signed and dated his contract one day prior to the town hall vote. On this technicality, the sale of land to Tobias Snoke's railway is rendered void. Since the line is trespassing on public property, its components will be stripped and sold at auction. Any further construction must circumnavigate the Sweet Springs valley by a margin of no fewer than ten miles, and be subject to monthly contract under review for environmental effects.”

Corruption and shady land sales? Measly charges in Ben's mind, but if they stick...

Seeing Hux rot away the next decade in a jail cell will be fine.

Mitaka dismounts now, sighing in relief—at having gotten cleanly through his facts, or because he's finally out of the saddle. Retrieving a pocketbook, the clerk approaches Rey on her porch. “Miss Ridley, for your initiation of the railroad’s demolition process and your execution of pending warrants for its slavers and trespassers, please accept this service payment of twenty-five dollars.” He offers her a check.

The slip’s made out to _Rachel_ _Ridley_ —and seems insultingly low for the risks she’s taken. But Rey doesn’t fling Mitaka's bank draft back in his face. She only eyes Ben sideway and dips the corner of her mouth into a smile.

“To Mr. Finn…”

“Freeman,” Finn says, while the clerk inscribes a second check.

“And?” Pen poised, Mitaka looks next to Finn's companion.

“R-r...Rose,” she says. Gripping her necklace, Rose turns to Finn as though facing down a firing squad. Clear-eyed and brave. “Miss Rose Tico.”

“ _What?_ ”

She twists her leather cord. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell—”

“ _Rose?_ ”

Her knuckles tighten around the necklace's curved metal ornament. Rose extends her other hand, palm vulnerable and open. “This wasn’t how I thought I’d tell you, but I—”

“You— _wasn’t how you thought?_ —you let me think—” Finn stammers. Ignoring her outstretched hand, he stares at her, color heating in his dark cheeks. “What the— _Rose?_ —did you even—my friend? So—so who are you? Paige’s sister? Tico? Or Rose, or Rose Tico—”

“In love with you as all of them.” She whispers her words as a most obvious truth.

Though her voice is confession-quiet, it cuts through Finn’s outrage so that he stutters to a halt. Mouth parted, he just looks at her again.

“I...I’m…” he tries after a shocked, silent moment. He visibly fails to find adequate words. “Rose—I—” Finn breathes hard, shoulders jolting. But then...then his chin comes up. His narrowed eyes open and brighten. He says, “I know.” Finn tugs Rose abruptly and awkwardly in against his chest by her offered hand, banging their noses together, her other arm pinned between them.

He kisses her.

“Well, that’s finally settled.”

Dusting her hands, Leia smiles with such satisfaction that Ben thinks she should be fined. Because she’s planned this, hasn’t she? It’s why she’s been so quiet: waiting for her triumphant moment.

Her smile only broadens when Rose extracts her arms and brings them up around Finn’s neck. The friends-turned-lovers clutch each other fiercely, obvious to everyone else—including Mitaka, who’s inscribed his check and keeps trying to give it to Rose.

Unsuccessfully.

Dameron's gaze is a little wistful while he watches the intertwined couple. Then he sighs, cocking an eyebrow to recall Mitaka. Who blushes again.

While the clerk makes a jumble of his reins and stirrups under Dameron’s regard, Leia dismounts from Millie. She approaches Rey’s porch, passing Finn and Rose with complacent composure.

“To Mr. Ben Solo, we also extend our gratitude for services rendered.”

She holds out a fourth check to him. Ben examines it; it’s also for twenty-five dollars. His mother presses his hand.

 _Twenty-five dollars_ : the reward amount printed on Kylo Ren’s posters.

It’s a good touch. But of course it would be, with Leia Organa.

“Thank you,” he says.

Leia’s eyes crinkle into crow’s feet, glistening under the sun. She squeezes his hand again. Then she turns away with her spine ramrod straight and her tone all brisk command, no hint of those tears lingering in her voice. She mounts onto a horse she’s led behind Millie, twitching her reins against the animal’s neck to circle it about.

“Mr. Dameron, Mr. Mitaka, we still have quite a lot to do in reviewing the voting rights regulations this evening.”

The mule following on their heels and munching clover as she goes, a closely coupled Finn and Rose retreat toward the barn’s privacy. The others ride down through the pastures, leaving Ben and Rey alone with their hands raised in smiling farewell.

But as soon as a sunny glint off Dameron’s sheriff star dims, Rey’s shoulders sag. “Thank the sweet lord, that’s over.”

Ben cants his head. “I thought it went well.”

“Oh, it went fine. But I want to get that first row of chinking done today, and you heard how Mitaka talks once he gets started. Dameron’s not much better, and your mother—”

“I know.” Ben touches her cheek, laughing. He steadies her while she steps off the porch and around to the shanty’s rear, where a bucket of chinking steams in the sun. He squats down, scoops a handful of ashy clay into his palm, and mashes it between the wall’s baseboards. The mixture quickly dries and hardens in the noonday heat. He packs another handful, then another while Rey critiques his methods; but she keeps her arm in its sling, rather than shoving him aside to demonstrate proper wall-chinking technique.

_Progress._

“It’s a funny thing...” he says.

She holds out for a full thirty seconds while he works along the shanty’s foundation, then cracks. “All right, what’s funny?” He hears the annoyed crinkles forming above her nose. Ben grins.

“I always thought happiness was riding off into the sunset. That was the good ending in stories, the way you knew it was time to close the book. But here I am, filthy to my elbows in a bucket of lime and clay, you telling me I’m doing it wrong every other minute—”

“Well, you were! Chinking was leaking through inside and getting the hem of my dress dirty—”

“And it turns out, this is happiness too.”

 _Silence_.

Rey doesn’t say anything for a minute. For three. Ben packs another line of chinking. Waiting, listening. But when she’s still quiet after five eternal minutes, he can’t help looking up.

The corners of her mouth are tucked into shadow. She's biting her lip. Rey's eyes are overbright. “I...I don’t think I know how to be happy, Ben. I’m not good at happy. It frightens me, because I don’t know if I can bear to lose—this. But I…” She draws a deep breath. And then a radiance blossoms over her tears. “I want to try. I want to try to be happy. With you.”

_Did you love her, I wonder?_

And _wonder_ —that’s what Ben feels. With his calves cramped from squatting and the beginnings of a sunburn on his neck: _wonder_. Not fear of all the things that could go wrong. Of the many that will—shadows falling across their sunshine. Because there will be shadows—her nightmare demons, and his. Guilt. It won’t be easy. But this... _wonder_.

Rey, willing to try.

For him. For them both.

After everything that’s happened—Rey, daring to imagine that she could be happy.

“I’ll be here,” he tells her. “Right here, chinking your walls, feeding your mule, planing your shingles—hell, I’ll even try to cook. For as long as you want me. For as long as I make you happy. For as long as—”

Thank god, she cuts him off. Rey seals her lips over his, binding all the unsaid things between them—their sun and shadow promises. So Ben just holds her in the dappled light behind their shanty, grimy with silt, ash, and lime, knowing that she knows.

Holds her and holds her and holds her.

It’s so much more than enough. Until—

“That’ll be Millie wanting her grain.” Humming a sweet little melody in her throat, Rey smiles against Ben’s chest, then grimaces when their shirts stick together with the chinking’s binding sap. “You did promise…”

“All that time we were in the stall, she didn’t bray once. But now—” Laughing, Ben threads his dirty fingers through Rey’s left hand. “Let’s go feed the damn mule.”

“But...Finn and Rose...” She resists his tugging pressure for a moment. And her eyes dance.

Ben raises his eyebrows. “Right. We should give them their privacy, shouldn't we?”

“A few more minutes, at least.” Smirking, Rey pulls his head down for another kiss.

Millie ends up waiting over an hour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you for riding along with me through this fic! It's been a blast. Wishing you [happy trails](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgw_yprN_-w)!
> 
> If you enjoyed _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ , tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.
> 
> And if you've got a hankering for more of my insanity, there's that Mad Max AU with survivor!Rey and paramilitary!Kylo, [Sun, Sand, and Stone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14159823/chapters/32636709)? Fair warning: it has snakes, cacti, and more riverbed smut.


End file.
